Love it!

Thank you Jeff, I’ve got it!! In fact, today I was finally able to make time for my mom, who was suffering from pain and numbness in her feet. Recently she got nerve block injection treatment in her hip, and it made her pain worse. I gave her a massage, which I hadn’t done like in a decade (!), and it came as a pleasant surprise that she said it really worked. 🙂

That’s much better. With respect to family and friends, “carve out” is like, you’re scheduling it, like you would put it in your calendar, with a date and a start time and end time. Even “set aside” is like to reserve time. You can say “make time for,” which is more like make sure you have time to do those things. It’s less of like an appointment and more about setting priorities.

Thank you for your tips! “Set aside” is certainly a better word.
Then how about going like this: “At the end of every weekend, I decide I must set aside some time to tidy up my room when the next weekend comes. Then Monday morning comes,… and I think I will set aside some time to look for a best deal on flight tickets. On the same day, I come home drained from work, and I realize that I have to carve out at least 7 hours for a healthy night’s sleep.”
By the way, do you set aside time for your family/friends or carve out time for your family/friends, when it’s long overdue and they are special to you? (Carving out seems too exaggerating and setting aside seems so minor, so maybe is there a better expression for it? )

These are correct uses of carve out time. I think, “make up my mind to…” might be a little strong for the situation. We use that when there’s a hard decision or a matter of great importance. You can just say, “At the end of every weekend, I carve out some time to tidy up my room.”

“Carve out” is often used when you make a specific effort to block off time for something relatively important. A softer way of saying the same thing is “set aside time.” You would use “set aside time” for things that are relatively less important, or less difficult to fit into your schedule. In your example, I would keep “carve out” for getting more sleep. As for cleaning a room or searching for flights, I might use “set aside” in those cases.

“must” is something you use in the present tense looking forward: “You must call 24 hours in advance if you want to cancel an appointment” or “I must get my car washed before our next trip.” When looking back at a necessity, you can say, “I had to”

Therefore, you can never say “must” + past tense (as you suspected).

So, before retirement, or at the moment of your retirement, you can say: “When I retire, I must carve out a new role for myself in life.” However, if you’re looking back, you can say, “When I retired, I had to carve out a new role for myself in life.”

And I want to ask about above sentence. Is the word “carved” right? Or just use “carve”.

tks, it’s exactly what I wanted to say

When you say, “carve out the first position,” do you mean, “take a leadership role”? If so, you might say, “When you decide to carve out a leadership role for yourself at work, pay attention not to overwhelm your colleagues.”

“Pay attention to” is right – I think you are using this as an imperative (like an instruction). In that case, you can say “Pay attention to” + infinitive: “Pay attention not to overwhelm…”