Hi Barbara,
Finding a balance between one's professional responsbilities and personal life is a challenge many of us face. In your post you raise a number of very good questions about the frequency of getting feedback to students. For smaller projects getting them back within 24 hours is a good practice to follow. For major projects set a reasonable time to get the evaluated results back to the students. Generally this would be a around a week. This will give you time to evaluate the work without spending excessive hours outside of the class and yet the projects will be fresh in the minds of the students so they will be ready to discuss them when you hand them back.
Keep your family and your personal life foremost in your life becausee they are most important. After that you can create strategies for getting projects, quizzes and tests back to the students within a reasonable time frame. There are not hard or fast rules on returning student work. The quicker you can return their results the quicker they will know their status in the course and that helps them focus their effort on areas that need improvement as well as areas of competence.
Some of the other posts contain some very good suggestions for how to reduce the time investments whiile still getting the feedback to students. Look these over and see if you can use some of these ideas to help your workload to improve.
Gary
