Within the bounds of needing to be responsive to clients and making sure that work product goes out on time, I am in control of my work schedule. With this modicum of control, I’ve been able to experiment with different workweek patterns in order to find rhythms that work best for certain periods. The normal version of my public availability is half days most days of the week (balanced between mornings and evenings to ensure better overall availability across a full week) with Tuesday being meeting free. Mind you, it never seems to actually work out that way but it looks decent on paper and it’s better than previous iterations.

Currently, Bill is on vacation. To better cover his absence, I modified my public calendar availability so that people could book meetings with me at any point from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays. This was an unsuccessful experiment, one that reminded me why I limited my public-facing availability in the first place. Don’t misunderstand me—I’m always grateful for the opportunity to pitch a prospective client. I’m even more grateful when those meetings get batched together as I find it preferrable to have two or three hours of solid meetings rather than to break them up. This week, though, there have been several 30 minute breaks between 30 minute meetings due to more overall availability and that has caused stop-start days. It’s not the worst thing in the world; it just means that I’ve had to push the “real” work to the early mornings and the evenings. If I had more of a social life filled with evening activities, then my current work schedule would be more of a problem than it actually is. Maybe that’s the real reason I’m a little embittered about the whole thing; it’s definitely not the vacation thing. In any event, I’ll have a new iteration of my calendar by May after a few work trips during the rest of April. It is my hope that I’ll return to the path of incremental improvement after this misstep.