Indie Life--The Life/Writing Balance

I sometimes say I have four jobs: my day job; taking care of my son; taking care of cooking, laundry, cleaning, and all the other chores of life; and after all that gets done, writing. My main writing times are on my lunch hour at work and after my son goes to sleep; it's actually harder write on the weekends than it is during the week. You can imagine with that kind of schedule, it may be hard to make any progress with writing. It is slow at times, much slower than I'd like, but it does add up over time. I would love to be able to devote more time for writing, but that's not an option right now.

What is a healthy ratio of writing to the rest of one's life, and how does going indie affect that? Obviously, an indie author does have to add a lot of other writing-related tasks into her schedule that aren't actually writing. But if these tasks give you control, they may not feel so much like work. (Except for formatting for CreateSpace. That's always work.) Also, formatting, editing, and other publishing tasks generally take less time than it does to write a story, and they get easier with practice.

As difficult as it can be sometimes to juggle a lot of different roles, this isn't always bad news for a writer. Doing different tasks can refresh your mind so you can come up with a new approach to a story. Daily life can also serve as inspiration for situations or characters. As much as I sometimes want to spend all day in front of my laptop working on the stories in my head, that's not always healthy. Sometimes different jobs or roles will shift in priority, so being adaptable can help.

Anyway, having spent most of my writing time this evening trying to work on this post, I think it's time to hit publish and go to bed--something that doesn't always get as much of a priority as it should?

What are your priorities in life? How do you maintain a life/writing balance?