Seeking tips to not lose world progress in multiplayer

The most recent information I can find is that the world autosaves every 20 minutes. So let's say I want to login and play for 10 minutes, because I want to quickly fill all torches in our village with resin. Is my only choice to wait for the next autosave? Leaving the game running is a dangerous proposition, as you never seem to ever truly be safe from monsters.

I've definitely noticed several times where I lost the last several minutes of world progress. And there also doesn't seem to be any way to tell when a save is processed, so even if I could wait around for the next autosave, you have to guess and hope that it happened. And I've read reports that sometimes an autosave gets skipped.

I've also experienced total desync errors, where I spent way too much time mining out a copper vein and cleaning out a burial chamber, only to see hours of world progress wiped away. At some point I stopped being able to pickup items from the ground, and saw many other indicators of dysfunction. Unfortunately, these obvious signs of such dysfunction only started appearing well into the session, giving me no sign that I shouldn't have mined and so forth.