Thirty hours later
My plans to managing my LilyPond addiction have been working well. Ten days ago, I began restricting myself to 3 hours a day; I've managed to stick to that. It's been immensely refreshing -- I'm no longer managing a beast with an unending list of problems to work on. Instead, I look at the problems, pick out the most important or most unique (i.e. difficult for other people to work on) issues, and work on those for my allotted time. Other issues are filed away in the bug database, where somebody (possibly me) can work on them later.
Quite apart from the morale boost, this has given me time to get back to my actual research. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised about how easily I got back into it -- I'd forgotten how interesting it was. I'd spent over a month working other stuff, both lilypond-specific, and helping out other people in the lab.
I've decided to reduce my lilypond time to 2 hours a day for the next few months. This isn't part of a gradual withdrawl from lilypond [1]; rather, it's because I have a few conference paper deadlines in April and May, and I want to make sure I do a good job on them.
(I'm not ruling this out at a later stage; it's a great way to force other people to take over your tasks).
So the general rule is 2 hours a day. Any day that I'm not at home (i.e. wake up and sleep at home) is an exception; depending on the circumstances, I might spend more than 2 hours, or not do anything at all. For normal days, my time will be prioritized as mentioned before: urgent emails, mentoring contributors, non-urgent emails, then working on various problems or feature requests.
PS. no, this is not a "new year's resolution"; it's pure coincidence that I switched to 3 hours ten days ago and started looking ahead at what I wanted to get done in the next few months.