For the sake of adding more hours for work on personal projects, I can add two things that works for me:

1) It might not be necessary to sleep exactly 7 hours. I found out that if I sometimes sleep less, nothing tragic happens.

2) What also works is that I don't need to spend every evening with my wife. I don't mean it in a negative sense, we have a very good relationships, but in a lot of evenings, I just do my things on the computer, and she does her things, and it's totally ok.