I find myself lagging behind on new skills, techniques, language features, etc, and I am finding the time to do so is lacking. Between work, professional, personal and family obligations, I'm lucky to find a few stray hours here and there to focus on any new technologies or reading that I want or need to do. I do make it out to relevant local user groups, but even those are sometimes hard to get to?

So I thought I would ask the community, where, or when, do you find the time to focus on honing your skills or learning new ones? Do you schedule time? Forgo some sleep during the week or weekend? Insomnia? Something else?

EDIT I want to thank all of you who took the time to answer and offer up your advice. There were some things I knew or had thought about, and others I hadn't considered as an option until you shed new light on it.

EDIT 2: In trying to find which answer among the many great ones to accept, I went with @Paddyslacker's since it is the one I feel is best suited for my current situation, although everyone had some very good nuggets of wisdom, such as @Elisha @Martin or @dash-tom-bang.  

Let me start by saying I know where you are coming from. I work for a small company with lots of stuff to do and I am a family man with two kids under the age of five. I have no intention of being an absent father or husband, or doing a poor job for my employers, so it is extremely difficult to find the time for new stuff.

I think the trick is to make your goals extremely small and achievable and go from there. Earlier in the year I wanted to write some blog posts. Instead of setting a generic "write some blog posts" goal, I made a micro target of "write for two hours a week; don't worry about whether it's good enough to post." I didn't worry about the larger goal, but instead made sure I achieved the micro goal that ultimately meant I achieved what I wanted.

Right now, I'm interested in BDD frameworks, but rather than have a goal of learning them, my goal is simply to spend 30 minutes a day on them. Even if the 30 minutes is simply downloading and installing cucumber, I'm okay with that. Ultimately, I will achieve my goal.

Someone much wiser than me once said that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time; similarly the only way to hone your skills is in small chunks of time. Rather than stressing about some larger goal, if you focus on freeing up just two hours a week, over the next year that's 100 hours you've dedicated to something new.
