To Sleep, Or Not To Sleep…

I need your help solving a problem. Writing it all out here will help, but your input will help even more. I gotta know: how do you balance sleep and pursuing the things you love?

Here’s my deal:

I could get more writing done if I woke up just one hour earlier each morning. But I’d be missing one hour of sleep.

I could go to bed one hour earlier, but I’d be missing an hour spent with my hubby (which is a rare, valuable thing these days!)

I could start drinking caffeine again, and get everything I wanted–but I might end up crashing or getting sick after some weeks.  But that’s a maybe, not a definite.

So do I bet on the maybe?

A little more than a year ago, I spent a month waking up each morning at 5AM; I got ready for work until 5:45, then wrote until 6:40 (when I got my kids up and ready for daycare.) It was amazing for my writing! I made so much headway on my projects (plus, I’m at my most creative first thing in the morning, so it was even high-quality headway!) But, I fell asleep on the sofa before 10PM each night, which cut into hubby-hangout time significantly. And then, after a month or so, I crashed. I couldn’t make myself get out of bed before 6:30AM to save my life. That felt worse than the early rising had felt good. So then I was back to square one. I make decent progress on my projects as is, but I know I’m capable of more/better.

So, what do you all do?  Any of you out there who have to slot your passion into impossibly small slivers of time, how do you do it?  Have you come up with any key observations/practices that have made the whole thing easier/more successful?

I’m all ears! Send me your success stories, horror stories, and lessons learned!