"There's nowhere else to put it"

This is the chapter the rest of the book depends on. If the late stretch is a poor way to get your own time, the fair question is where else it's supposed to come from. If I can't answer, everything else I've said is just telling a tired person to go to bed.

I'll start with what I can't do. I can't add hours to your day. If you're a single parent with two jobs, or you care for someone who needs you from waking until sleep, your shortage is real, and no rearrangement will fully close it. What I can do is point at places where time of your own sometimes turns out to be hiding. Not all will apply to you. I'd be surprised if none did.

The first place is the early evening, and it needs a change of order more than a change of amount. At the moment, your own time comes after everything else is done. The trouble is that household jobs don't have an end. There's always another load of washing or another surface to wipe. If you wait for the jobs to be finished, you'll wait until you're too tired to do anything but sit.

So turn the order round. Your own time gets a fixed start, and the jobs fit round it. Say the children are down by eight. From eight until a quarter to nine is yours. You're less tired then than you'll be at any later point, so it's the best hour the evening has. You read, or draw, or sit in the garden, or have the bath. At a quarter to nine you do what jobs still matter, and then the closing-up from chapter 9. Some jobs won't get done. The next paragraph is about those.

The second place is the jobs themselves. Tired people tend to keep house to a standard set by someone more rested, often a parent or a younger self. Ask of each evening job whether it could be done less often, done worse, done by someone else, or left undone. Packed lunches can be the same four days running. The ironing pile, in many households, can be abolished by folding things. A kitchen can be left untidy overnight, and nothing happens. I'd suggest a closing time for chores, the way a shop has one. After nine, say, the kitchen is shut, and whatever isn't done waits until tomorrow.

The third place is other people. If you share a home with another adult, the evenings may be split less evenly than either of you has noticed. One arrangement that works for some couples is an evening off each. On Tuesday one of you is off duty from half past seven. The other handles the bedtimes, the jobs, and whoever comes downstairs wanting water, and on Thursday you swap. One guaranteed evening a week can take a lot of pressure off the other six, because the need isn't building without limit. If you're parenting alone, the same idea might run through a grandparent, a friend with children, or a swap with another single parent. I know that's easier to write than to arrange.

The fourth place is the working day. Many people eat lunch at a desk while answering email, then grieve at night for the time they never had. A lunch break taken away from the desk, alone, with a book or a walk, is your own time in daylight. So is a commute, if you stop using it to clear the inbox. These are small. But the late stretch is partly driven by the feeling that nothing in the day was yours, and even twenty minutes that was can weaken that feeling.

The fifth place is the morning, and I offer it carefully. Once you're sleeping enough, some people find that waking half an hour before the household gives them the quiet they were looking for at midnight, in better condition. The house is as still at six as at twelve. This only works if bedtime moves too. Getting up earlier while still going to bed at one is the same mistake at the other end of the night.

The sixth place is the word no. Some of what fills your evenings was agreed to and didn't have to be. Committees, favours and extra shifts all count here, and so does the WhatsApp group you administer. One fewer of those is an evening back.

Here's an objection I'd expect. "If I take an hour at eight, I'll feel guilty the whole time, with the kitchen like that." You may, at first. I'd point out that you already take two hours, at a time when you feel guilty for being up. The guilt is there either way. At eight o'clock it buys you an hour you can use.

Notice what's changed in the question. It started as "how do I make myself go to bed?" It's become "where in my day do I come in?" I think that's the more useful question, and the late nights were a way of never quite asking it.