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.
What it doesn't know
This is arithmetic on clock times. It has no view on whether the rate you picked is realistic for you, and no plan on paper survives contact with a schedule that keeps changing. Smaller daily steps mean more days but less disruption; larger steps are faster on paper and harder in practice.
It also can't account for the rest of your life — shift work, a newborn, a time-zone change, or a body clock that simply runs late. If your sleep timing is persistently out of step with the life you need to live, that's a real category of problem with real clinical answers, and it's worth taking to a doctor rather than a calculator. The questionnaire covers timing among the things it asks about.
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 — thesleep debt calculator andthe range for your age are the quicker checks.