Ten o'clock

Here's an example, and you can change the details to fit. You get in from work at half past six. There's dinner to make and eat and clear away. There are children to bath and read to and put back to bed twice. Then there's a load of washing, tomorrow's packed lunches, and a form for the school that's due in the morning. At a quarter past nine you sit down for the first time since lunch.

At ten you yawn, and your eyes are heavy. If you went up now you'd be asleep in ten minutes and you'd get eight hours. You know all this.

You stay. You're not watching anything special. It's an episode of something, then another, with your phone in your hand through most of it. At some point you notice it's twenty to one. You go up, annoyed with yourself, and the alarm goes at half past six. You get through the next day on coffee and a short temper, and by nine that evening you're looking forward to the only good part of the day, which starts when everyone else has gone to bed.

If you don't have children, the evening will look different and the pattern may not. The demands might come from a job that follows you home, or from a parent who needs a call every night, or from a partner. Some people live alone and have the pattern anyway, because the day belonged to work and the evening is the only part that doesn't.

People have started calling this revenge bedtime procrastination. The idea is that you're taking revenge on a day that left you nothing. I think the name gets something right. The staying up has a note of defiance in it that ordinary dawdling doesn't. It feels like a small refusal.

I want to split two things that the habit glues together.

The first is the need. You need some time in the day when nobody is asking you for anything and you decide what happens. I'll call that your own time. It's as real a need as food, and people who get none of it for long stretches become worn and resentful. Nothing in this book argues against it.

The second is the method. At the moment, you get your own time by staying up past the point where you're tired. I'll call that point the tired point, and in the examples it's ten o'clock. The stretch between the tired point and lights out I'll call the late stretch. The method is to buy your own time with sleep, at the end of the day, after everything else has been paid.

The argument of this book is that the need is sound and the method is bad. The method delivers your own time at the hour when you're least able to use it. The next day pays for it, which makes the next day harder, which makes the next evening's need bigger. And it lets the real problem, a day with no room in it for you, carry on untouched.

I should say what this book doesn't claim. It doesn't claim you should never stay up late. A late night chosen for a good reason is one of life's pleasures, and chapter 13 keeps a place for it. There's no moral difference between early nights and late ones, and the book doesn't claim one. It doesn't claim that sleep will fix your life either. If your days are overfull, they'll still be overfull when you're rested. You'll just be better placed to do something about it.

Before the next chapter, I'd like you to collect a little information, without changing anything. For one week, write down two times each morning. The first is when you first noticed you were tired the evening before. The second is when you turned out the light. A scrap of paper by the bed will do. We'll use the numbers later.