Time considered as a helix of blocked-off scheduling

Once again, my week was middling. Satisfying as far as it went, but not as productive as it should have been.
•I read Love That Moves the Sun to one of my writer’s groups and got the assessment I expected but hoped I was wrong: It reads like a fragment of a longer work.
I’d conceived it as sort of the first story in a series, but I was nagged by the possibility it was more like the opening of a novel or at least a novella. And the nagging voice was right. This means a lot more work to get it publishable, but at least I know it’s not wasted time.
•I did some more work on Brain From Outer Space.
•I finally got a draft of Fox and the Hedgehog that I like. Still needs massive work, but I’m not worried about having to throw everything out and start over. And I really like my protagonist.
•I did a little work on It’s Never Jam Today, one of my second-string stories I finally feel ready to push to completion. Still no idea where it’s going though.
•I proposed my next movie book idea to McFarland. They asked me to submit a more detailed proposal, which I will work on next month.
One reason I didn’t get more done is, perversely, that I blocked off so much time to fiction this month, to make up for all the Demand Media work last month. It became very easy to imagine that if I were slow one week, it would be easy to make it up the next. I was wrong. Next time I do anything like this, I’ll set weekly time goals instead of monthly (I can make up the lost time next month, I think).
Generally, though, I’m pleased with the new schedule I’ve adopted: 7 am to 5 pm with an hour for lunch and evenings off. It seems to work very well and not doing any evening work is somewhat relaxing.
The downside remains that I don’t have much time to do odds and ends during the day (work on Mum’s stuff, run errands, etc.). Particularly as it’s currently more like 7:30 a.m. to 5 with a half-hour for lunch so that I can walk or bike while it’s cool. This is not the time of year to go out at noon, but that slices my off-time into small packages.
A bigger problem is that with a 9-hour work day, I’m very resistant to doing anything in the evening (other than blogging) even if it’s to my advantage—to make up for a doctor’s appointment for instance (this is another reason I didn’t make the hours I’d planned). I may just have to cut out accept doing a couple of hours less in the week when something like that comes along (it’s not like I have that many errands). Of course, it would be different if I had deadlines for stuff—that can push me to devote extra time—but most of my stuff is on spec, so I have nothing to drive me but my desire to write. Which gets me through the day, but not, it seems the evening.
Another detail is that this year I’ve begun blocking out three hours a week for special projects, such as Philosophy and Fairytales. However I’ve also started using them for smaller projects—my And columns, newspaper articles, etc.
At this point, that’s okay: My other projects are speculative (like a podcast of my books) so it’s not as if I lose money by taking it slow. If I don’t make enough progress on them, though, it may become an issue. We’ll see.