An aspect I struggle with in nearly every facet of life revolves around setting aside time to do something – time to exercise, finishing projects at my day job, volunteering in the community, fixing the plumbing, visiting friends for a game night, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And that has been how I addressed creating – making time to make. Waiting until my kids go to bed, then using that time to draft and edit, because I didn’t want to take from family time. Even my interests around personal productivity have this pernicious undercurrent of trying to fit more into less time.
But what if when I sit down to write, I use that as a time to engage my children in the process of creation. Let them see me work, struggle, fail, push through. Ask their thoughts about word choice, plot points, character motivation? What if making became part of my family time, a part of play, or a part of learning? Would that change how I create or impact my motivations? I think it would.
What might you decide to do if you could just make instead of having of make time? And what if you didn’t have to change anything except your own paradigm?
Grant Michael Gardner 
One thing I know from experience is that one’s hobby and passion is not always shared or understood by one’s relatives, be it family or good friends. Besides, sharing your passion may entice them to study that topic which you already know all about and just like gardening, it can take years before they start feeding you with comments liable to improve your skills, even assuming you suddenly put your own passion on hold. What children and wife can help you get if you share a story with them is good insights on how a child/wifey character would react “if it was up to them” and the risk of them enticing you to rework massive chunks of your story to better suit their point of view may pretty much turn your story as generic as can possibly be—especially if they’re cautious about never making any questionable statement.
I do understand that as a father, and as a company employee, most of your time is bleeding on either family or work. The only way to make sure you can have time to handle a specific hobby is the same whether you want to hit the gym or write a novel: book a specific timespan in the day/week and notify the relevant people you won’t be available in that timespan, combine it with the Pomodoro technique (smartphone off, phone unplugged, computer properly set to prevent waste of time on social networks and Youtube, etc.) and you should be able to focus to really make.
To some extent, your ability to spot specific clauses and wording from your relatives and colleagues can prove very useful when it comes to shape your characters’ speech patterns. Language is heavily tied to the historical and social context of each individual so you can somehow widen your paradigm by making mental notes that you’ll be able to jot down when it comes to write.
At any rate, involving people who are too close to you in the making process may help you in the short term but I’m fairly sure it can’t really stand the long term. To some extent, your difficulties to balance your time only highlight why it can be a full time job for a handful of writers who are utterly confident in their writing skills. I do reckon another opinion may be in order here, maybe someone from the industry could help to see if you can do that and deliver.
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