Sleep schedule shift planner
Move your bedtime in steps, and see what each day looks like.
Your plan
That's earlier, which at the rate you chose takes days. Your time in bed stays the same throughout — both ends move together.
That's later, which at the rate you chose takes days. Your time in bed stays the same throughout — both ends move together.
That's already your bedtime, so there's nothing to shift.
Check the times: bedtime and wake time need to be different, and the daily step has to be between 5 and 120 minutes.
| Day | Bed | Wake |
|---|
This is arithmetic on clock times. How fast a schedule can actually move varies a lot between people, and a plan on paper is not a prediction about how you'll sleep. If your sleep timing is out of step with the life you need to live and staying that way, that's worth raising with a doctor rather than solving with a spreadsheet.
What the plan does
It moves bedtime and wake time together by the same amount each day, so your time in bed never changes — only where it sits on the clock. It also takes whichever direction round the clock is shorter: moving from 02:00 to 23:00 is treated as three hours earlier, not twenty-one hours later.
The last day always lands exactly on your target rather than overshooting it, so the final step is sometimes smaller than the others.
Before you shift anything
Check that the window you're moving is long enough to begin with. If you're already short on hours, moving the same short window earlier won't fix how you feel — the sleep debt calculator and the range for your age are the quicker checks. To pick the target time itself, work back from your alarm with the bedtime calculator.
And if the schedule keeps slipping back however carefully you move it, that is a pattern rather than a habit — the sleep disorder quiz covers the timing questions a clinician would ask.