Sarpedon7325

They're full of shit. People in grad school are always posturing about how hard they work, but that's all it is. They've got some screwed up idea of what the perfect grad student is, and they constantly fail to meet it, and it wreaks havoc with their brain chemistry. 
Being a good student really isn't inconsistent with maintaining a healthy work-life balance. I was a great grad student: I published two papers in top specialist journals, presented at dozens of conferences, won awards, networked like hell, audited all kinds of classes, TAed every semester, applied for hundreds of jobs, etc. It didn't require me to give up on any hobbies or other fun stuff. And I'm not at all exceptional in that respect. Take the time to do your own thing. It'll help enormously with all the negative crap. Just don't let yourself get too distracted from your end goal!
As for making time for reading, I do most of mine on public transit, or for about an hour in bed at night. I often read during the day, too, but that's mostly down to how I feel in the moment. 
One word of advice: breaking your tasks down into smaller chunks and spreading them over time is way more effective than putting in whole days at a time. Read just one article a day, and by the end of a month that's a whole course's worth of reading; write an hour a day, and after a year you've got a draft of a dissertation, or after a few weeks, you've got a paper to send to conferences and journals; and so on.
The trick is to be consistent, and not to overload yourself with just one task. I try to write for about an hour a day (some days I get excited and it's more, and some days I lose the thread, but on the whole that's pretty much what it averages out to). I do that relatively early in the day, and then it doesn't matter what else I do that day; the pressure's off. I can take an hour or so to read a paper, too, and then that's two big things down. After that, the rest of the day is boring admin work, emails, course prep, whatever. And fun stuff.

Honestly, I think that the most important thing you can do is start professionalizing yourself, especially if you're starting a PhD. Everything else will come during the course of the PhD itself.
So, for example, start familiarizing yourself with the best journals in your subfield, and with the top generalist journals, and what kind of work gets published in which journal. Start developing a sense of how fast the turnaround is in various journals (the Cullison/APA list is helpful for that). Create an account on PhilPapers, and sign up for conference and publication alerts. Start looking at the CVs of grad students, postdocs, and assistant professors at a wide range of departments. In particular, look for people working in your inteded AOSes. Get a sense of what they're doing, and how it seems to have worked out for them. Figure out what the important conferences and associations are in your subfields. Start following the gossip on the main philosophy blogs. Start reading through the Job Market Boot Camp on the Philosophers' Cocoon. Start paying attention to what goes on in the forum over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That sort of thing.

Just sent my acceptance to Notre Dame!

Just sent my acceptance to Notre Dame!

Just sent my acceptance to Notre Dame!

I've accepted Yale, for the joint program in Classics and Philosophy (Classics track)
Declined Stanford and Toronto today and took myself off NYU waitlist

Thanks! Same to you!

No, no indication at all, sorry.

Waitlisted at Pittsburgh.

Waitlisted at Pittsburgh.

Just declined waitlist spot at CUNY. Also recently declined offer from Riverside and withdrew apps from Notre Dame, Indiana, Princeton, Boston U, Georgia State, and UW Milwaukee. Best of luck to everyone!

Waitlisted at Princeton via email from the DGS.