Yup, great post indeed. One thing that helps me a lot and ties in to a lot of Wynton's advice is to have a clear delineation between practice and screwing around. Both are important to me and neither can be had without the other. If I don't get to screw around, the practicing starts to feel pointless and if I don't practice, it's harder to screw around. So I kind of block off my uke playing time - not to a specific consistent amount or anything, but I make sure that I know what exactly the time's being used for. For example, if I have a whole hour free for my uke, I'll tell myself that the first full thirty minutes are practice time (the serious bit where I figure out how to play the uke and get the techniques down) and the second thirty minutes are screwing around time (where I either play random songs I like or start trying to pick or strum out my own tunes). In reality, both of these things are pretty close to each other, but having them as separate categories helps me out a lot.
One other thing that's really helped me is getting an iPhone and the "Ukulele" app by H2Indie. I don't use it for learning chords or fingerings or anything - I just use it as playtime for the music in me. I'll pick out a set of chords to use, then just strum and pick away on my iPhone, making noises that sound god to me. This brings a lot of fun and future possibilities into focus for me. When I have an actual uke in my hand, I'm still all caught up on where to put my fingers for chords and which chord should go after which other one and how I should be strumming or picking. This app takes all of that out of the equation and just lets me play around with the music itself. Then when I'm working on my uke, I can remember that there can be much more to a chord than just something to strum.
My apologies if that didn't make much sense - I've only gotten a few hours of sleep the past three days and I'm in serious ramble mode
Maybe I'll try to explain myself better after a really long nap.
