It's so difficult. Stop practicing on a skill, and you start to lose it. Start practicing, and it takes a while before it starts to show signs of improvement. Yet, one only has so limited time.
I've probably not touched anything significantly musical for around one entire year already. I'm not too worried about it since I've been practicing music for 8 years before that. But I have other skills that are just deteriorating. I used to bowl (ten-pin bowling) with an average of around 150 per game. Decent, and was improving towards 160 before I stopped. I was starting to get good enough to play online on C&C 3 Tiberium Wars, i.e. knowing hotkeys and building fast enough, etc. but then I had to stop. I was scripting rather actively for this website before it got stable enough for me to take a break, and resulted in also a stop (pause rather, I still update its scripts when I find the need to. Like preventing spam) I also used to go for photoshoots every now and then, which I'm still intending to, but haven't found a good occasion yet. Recently, I've managed to improve my stepmania skills (keyboard that is) which I used to play quite a bit at one point, and off and on, each time getting slightly better till the recent jump in improvement. I retired from Bejeweled Blitz because my performance was plateuing. There are other things as well like these which require constant practice to keep the level of skill.
Haiz... it's just so much. A good analogy would be to imagine one person trying to push many model cars (of significant mass) up a hill. The moment you take your hands off one, it begins to deccelerate and then grind to a halt, or even go backwards. The more time you spend pushing a particular car, the faster it goes, but it means less time for the other cars. Divide your time out equally, and none of them make it very far up the hill. It's so tough a choice.
I've been concentrating on squeezing as much productivity out of all the time I can get. My iPod Touch helps me because now I can use travel time, and time in the army (when free of course XD) to improve on skills or to satisfy some of my wants (like watching anime). I've recently also picked up Japanese Mahjong (which I feel is much more challenging and interesting than Hong Kong / Singaporean Mahjong) which requires, again, constant practice. More so because I'm just starting off.
It's kinda good that I find interest in so many things, but yet it's a big bane because I end up trying to pursue all of them kinda randomly, causing weird distribution of satisfaction which overall, isn't very satisfactory. This is a very difficult "non-quantifiable mathematical problem" which I can't work out, except to say that I need more time, i.e. ORD! But we know that will come, and until then, I'll still be stuck with trying to squeeze this severely dehydrated sponge of time for just a few more drops to do more things. Speaking of which, I better go sleep now. Even my sleep hours are suffering, and as you may notice, I've been not writing about dreams lately. This is the cause...
(As a sidenote: It's possible to work out non-quantifiable mathematical problems by using similar known values to approximate unknown values and thus solve. All values are of course abstract. Known abstact values are like your level of happiness. Unknown values are like the level of interest it takes to start watching a particular anime. This is something I came up with btw, I dunno if such terms exist.)