Balancing Time

How do you balance your time between writing, designing, and promoting? I'm still at a very early stage in my blog, so I'm trying to focus on writing, but I'm also motivated by seeing people stay on my site rather than bounce from it so I'm really wanting to work on redesigning and working on things like buttons and design elements to improve the 'stickiness' of my blog (get people that come to it to start moving around it). But I only have time for so many things.

How did you balance your time in early stages to ensure that you didn't give up? I'm worried if I start redesigning I will sink a lot of time into it and then writing will get harder and harder.

I have a lot of article ideas but learning how to do research and stuff is very foreign, how did you get started with that? i.e. I have an idea and the first few points for so many articles. How do I decide which ones to go deeper on and make into a really high quality post?