How You Should Deal With Interrupted Workdays

As a freelancer or author, we have to defend our working hours against everyday life. But sometimes this does not work. What do you do then?

In a perfect world, I would have about twenty-two working days every month, sitting at my computer from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, working.

That, minus one hour for lunch, would make forty hours a week of productive work.

Unfortunately, life usually doesn’t take care of our plans.

Today, for example, I had a two-hour video conference from ten o’clock in the morning to noo for a side project. The other participants couldn’t get to any other time of day, so I had to give in.

These two hours usually is part of my productive working hours. Usually, I produce between 2000 and 3000 words during this time. This means that by noon I would already have written two articles, half a short story, or ten pages of a book.

So today, this video conference has set me back three thousand words. I won’t be able to make up for this lost time later.

Interruptions that you cannot prevent.

Video conferencing is just one example of what can interrupt your workday. Here are a few other examples:

Doctor’s visits

I usually schedule visits to the doctor in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, this is the time when most people want to see a doctor, so I often only get appointments earlier in the day.

The older you get, the more appointments you will have per year. Once a year, you go to the dentist for a check-up, cancer screening, visits to the physiotherapist because your back hurts from sitting so much, and a thousand other reasons why you need the help of a doctor.

Since health is generally more important than money, there is often no alternative. You have to go to the doctor and cannot wait several weeks to get an appointment that fits your working day.

Tax consultant

It is the same as with the doctor. Everybody wants a late afternoon appointment, and you are probably rarely among those who get such an appointment.

If you work as a freelancer, there is no way around regular appointments with the tax consultant.

Business meetings

This falls into the same category as video conferencing. Whenever you have something professional to discuss with someone, the appointment will be within regular working hours. You can try to meet with business partners in a restaurant in the evening, but most of them wanted to be at home with their families at this time. This is understandable and unavoidable.

I could give many more examples, but I think you know what I am getting at. Often we simply cannot avoid spending our most productive hours with other things than creative work.

How you should handle it

As we have seen, such interrupted working days cannot be prevented. By the way, over the year, there are usually many more of them than we think.

So the only thing we can do is to plan such days in advance.

So if you plan what you want to have done by when in the year, you should not assume the best-case scenario and only expect perfect working days.

If you take the example from above and believe that you have forty hours of distraction-free work time available to you every week, you will soon be proven wrong.

Making plans based on ideal assumptions inevitably leads to frustration sooner or later. Frustration, in turn, costs you valuable energy and further reduces your performance. So it is not only the lost hours that reduce your productivity. Your expectations also perpetuate this effect.

So what to do? I now only plan half of the time I think I have available, and you too should consider that.

If I had forty hours a week to do my work, then theoretically I could write 40,000 words a week, if I estimate a thousand words per hour.

That this is utopian is immediately apparent to anyone who writes professionally. This naive calculation does not include necessary short breaks, research, administrative work, or unforeseen technical difficulties with the internet, computer, or telephone.

If you assume that at least once every two weeks, there will be an interruption in the day, as I described above, it is clear that the plan will not work out.

The theoretically possible 40,000 words quickly become 20,000 words.

This is still a high weekly workload for many people, but it can be achieved. Most professional writers efficiently manage 20,000 words per week when we look at the whole year.

Weeks with many interruptions alternate with weeks where everything is almost perfect. In one week, we create 30,000 or actually 40,000 words, while the next week, we’re lucky if we get to 10,000 to 20,000 words. Over the year, we can still average 20,000 words per week.

Conclusion

You cannot compensate for uninterrupted workdays once they are there. That’s why you have to plan for them in advance.

Calculate how many hours you have available in an ideal working week and then halve that number. Now you have a figure that you can plan with a reasonable degree of reliability.

Good planning means not lying to yourself. If you do not lie to yourself, you cannot disappoint yourself.

The ideal workweek does not exist. Remember this when you make your next plans.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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