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Time (to mangle the Rolling Stones lyric) is definitely not on my side. Like many Financial Times readers I’m sure, life for most of last year involved juggling a sheaf of to-do lists, with the clock as a permanent reminder that such a volume and variety of tasks would not and could not be completed.

Procrastination is not one of my psychological quirks, so that’s not it. And I’ve become quite good at “eating the frog” — doing one of the most unpleasant things on the list first, to give yourself a boost from getting it over with. No, the problem is quite simple: there is too much to do. This may be particularly the case for those with both young and old people to look after, as well as work responsibilities.

Luckily (if not happily), it seems that for many middle-aged women, large chunks of extra time open up in your diary around the same time as the tasks and responsibilities proliferate. But there is a catch — those hours are from about 3am to maybe five or six in the morning.

Yes, that’s right. Insomnia — it’s my tried and tested productivity hack for 2026. We’ve all been bludgeoned by the competitiveness of “the 5am club”, the go-getters who boast of starting their day super early to steal a march on the losers who need eight hours’ sleep a night. Well, this year I’m already planning the 3am club — think less business elite, more frazzled sandwich generation.

Here’s how it goes. Strange mid-life biological changes start to interrupt your sleep patterns, leading to some sort of internal alarm going off at approximately 3am, regular as clockwork. It’s not that you are sleeping badly (although a newfound sympathy for friends who have suffered with life-long insomnia is perhaps a moral gain from the experience). You are just plain awake. And judging by the number of times colleagues and friends have described the same phenomenon, joking that we could have sorted out our work questions in the small hours when we were both up, this is widespread.

You then have a choice: either worry about how bad the next day will feel, thereby worsening your anxious state; or embrace the bonus of a couple of extra hours to get on top of things. Personally, I found, following advice from a counsellor, that getting up to put on a load of laundry or mopping the floors has the benefit of a physical task that will eventually summon sleep again. Then I rationalise my to-do lists for the following days, and often get my physio exercises done. If I’m incurably alert, I might do some work, but using screens is not conducive to winding down again (though many are the columns I have written after midnight).

You could also get creative — but be warned the output may not be a gift to the rest of humanity. One of the moments of 2025 was surely Reform UK’s sequin-clad Andrea Jenkyns, on stage at the party’s conference belting out lines from her own composition — a bombastic rock anthem entitled “Insomniac”. “I’m an insomniac!/ Staring at the ceiling, waiting for my thoughts to switch off.”

Unforgettable, for sure, but not in a good way — and you have to assume she wrote it at night. So make sure you take a good hard look at your own masterpiece after you have managed to get some sleep.

Reading, somehow, doesn’t work for me — the mind stays too active and I’m still awake as the rest of the household gets up. Last year I took up Japanese visible mending for our socks and sweaters, with mixed but useful (and therapeutic) results. The aim is to eventually fall back into an emergency top-up sleep before the day really has to start.

Clearly, none of this is ideal. The mental and physical health effects of a lack of sleep can be severe. And on those nights when the internal alarm fails to go off, I slumber on blissfully and wake refreshed, much like my old (for which read young) self. But since at least for now it seems to be inevitable, better to accept and adjust. Chances are that this productivity hack will not solve the insomnia. But hey, we can beat those layabout 5am-ers at their own game and carry the day. And the night.

miranda.green@ft.com

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The boss of one of Europe’s largest grid operators has warned that too many speculative and unprepared projects are holding up grid connections for critical energy projects and causing years-long queues.

Bernard Gustin, chief executive of Elia Group, which operates the Belgian and parts of the German grid, said that operators of network infrastructure should be able to allocate connections to projects that are ready, rather than those that applied first.

‘‘I think in Belgium we have 10 times more projects [than] needed until 2030,” he said, referring to battery storage projects. “If you change from first come, first served to first ready, first served, then you will focus on the ones who are really serious because they have everything [ready].”

Grid connections have become a huge issue for European countries. Many are trying to manage a rapid increase in demand for grid access as more industrial plants and households install wind and solar power that can go into the grid, as well as an increasing number of applications from data centres to use energy from it.

In some countries, such as the Netherlands, queues to be connected to the grid stretch more than seven years. In Slovakia, about 50 per cent of capacity reserved for connection remains unused, according to commission figures. In Germany, there are twice as many requests to add battery storage to the grid as is planned in the country’s grid development plan, an Elia Group report found.

The rollout of renewables in the EU has outpaced the infrastructure needed to support it, as countries race to meet renewable energy targets set by Brussels and move away from imported fossil fuels. The European Commission has estimated that €1.2tn needs to be spent on the EU’s grids by 2040 in order to support the transition.

Gustin said that grid operators are competing for funding to rapidly build out networks and upgrade infrastructure to balance the volatility of wind and solar energy.

After years of stagnant investment levels, “we all have huge capex plans, so big that you need to be able to finance them, which is a challenge”, he said.

Costs from grid congestion — where cheap electricity cannot flow to where demand is so people have to pay for higher cost sources — are rising. Acer, the EU energy regulator, has said that they reached €5.2bn in 2022 and could rise to €26bn by 2030.

In a document published in December, Brussels set out recommendations to prioritise connections to the grid. The commission also said that it would take a more top-down approach to energy infrastructure planning in order to accelerate the build-out and ensure costs were shared between EU countries.

“In Europe it’s a huge problem and we lose billions every year in lost value because of curtailment and bottlenecks,” EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen told the Financial Times.

In a report on energy storage, Elia Group found that the first 100GW of installed batteries in Europe would reduce the curtailment of renewable power by 13 per cent, meaning that 13 per cent more power would be available.

Elia plans to spend €31.6bn on grid upgrades until 2028, split roughly one-third to Belgium and two-thirds to its German arm. To deal with connection demands from batteries, data centres and renewable energy installations could cost an additional €10bn, Gustin estimated.

“These are not small amounts . . . you have a lot of people saying we don’t want tariffs to go up on energy, electricity is not competitive. And so we have a first challenge [which] is how do we make sure, given the amounts we need to raise, that we have a competitive return on equity?”

Gustin, who was formerly chief executive of Brussels Airlines, oversaw a €2.2bn capital raise earlier this year, bringing in investors such as BlackRock and the Canadian pension fund CPP.

Often the length of time it takes to grant permits for infrastructure projects is seen as a risk factor by investors, he said, with permitting times in Belgium running up to eight years.

“By [that] time inflation and the price have increased and some investors are telling you these were not the conditions we had at the start, we cannot continue,” he said.

The EU’s recent legislation aims to speed up permitting times by setting time limits for permit deliberations and proposing that energy projects should be seen as having an overriding interest.