Flicking through the book The ONE Thing, the author talks about the aim of a “balanced” life might not result in achieving much in particular.
He talks about blocking off time to work on your one main project, and gives the example of working half the time on that, and half the time on everything else.
This ratio seems like it’s possibly workable. I swung too far (working on the one thing basically all the time I had available to me), resulting in not keeping up in any way with “all the other stuff”.
That’s a hypothesis I’ll test out: work half the time on the most important thing, then give myself permission to move on.