Some things are so scarce, rarefied, or valuable that we’re inclined to measure them in tiny quantities.
Time, money, and respect spring to mind.
Concerning quantifiable nouns, feel free to use discrete measurements, i.e. “€7.45” or “three minutes.” To be more evocative, use equivalencies, like “€7.45 of bottom shelf liquor” or “a three-minute piss break.”
For abstract ideas, you’ve got abstract measurements. Fortunately — or unfortunately, for you 100 percent completionists — there’s no dearth of such words in English.
Here’s a few: bit, tad, touch, tinge, flash, dash, drop, shred, scrap, spot, speck, and trace.
If you want to get math-y-science-y, there’s these: grain, fragment, particle, molecule, atom, ounce, iota, and mite.
For the more whimsical or pretentious: pinch, modicum, scintilla, soupçon; whit, jot, tittle, trifle, smidge, and smidgen.
Each of these words has a rich, interesting history. Maybe. Actually, I didn’t look up their etymologies (or, in one case, probably an etymology). Right now we’re focused on frequency.
Cue Google Ngram. (If you’ve got a better tool, please share it.)
And, pitting the top three in each category against each other like linguistic Pokémon:
There you have it, “bit” is the most common (written, scanned into Google) word for abstract little things in English.
What do you think happened in the 1980s? Maybe that’s when all that gluten-free stuff started showing up.
But not a lot of it. Just a little bit.