Did mine and the night qual within six months of doing the skills test. Did it in about 17 hours including the test.
Reason I did it more or less straight after the skills test was that I was still in 'training' mode and I hadn't picked up any bad habits. The other reason was I never saw the vanilla PPL as a license to fly, the night and IMC were always part of the license to me.
I use mine all of the time; I'm lucky that I fly from a well equiped airfield and if I haven't done an approach for real within a month I go off and do a few practice ones. You have to keep on top of it, not for the actual hands on flying bit but for the procedures, they are the bits that I tend to get rusty on if I don't do them fairly regularly.
The other reason you do it of course is to punch through a grey rainy overcast into a brilliant blue sky...never get sick of doing that.
Oh and congrats on the PPL, welcome to poverty!!
