Write Tomorrow's To-Do List Before Bed: What a Sleep Study Found

What the sleep study found

In 2018, psychologists from Baylor University and Emory University published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General with a simple question at its heart: does what you write at bedtime change how quickly you fall asleep?

Fifty-seven healthy adults aged 18 to 30 spent a night in a sleep laboratory, wired up for polysomnography, the same overnight recording sleep clinics use. Before lights-out, everyone wrote for five minutes. Half listed the tasks they needed to remember over the next few days. The other half wrote about tasks they had completed over the previous few days.

The to-do list group fell asleep significantly faster. Baylor's write-up of the study puts the difference at about nine minutes on average. Within that group, people who wrote more specific lists fell asleep faster still. Writing about finished tasks showed the opposite trend: the more detail people wrote, the slower they dropped off.

Michael Scullin, who led the study, noted that a gap of that size is in the range reported in clinical trials of some prescription sleep medications. That comparison is about the size of the effect. It is not a reason to swap a prescription for a notepad.

Why writing it down quiets your mind

Psychologists have known for nearly a century that unfinished tasks stick in the mind. It is known as the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik, whose experiments in the 1920s found that people remembered interrupted tasks better than completed ones. Handy at 11 in the morning. Less handy at 11 at night.

In 2011, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister looked at what it takes to switch that replay off. Across several experiments, unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task and dragged down performance on word puzzles. When people were allowed to write a specific plan for the unfinished goal, those effects went away, even though the goal itself was still unfinished.

Their explanation is the useful part: once a plan exists, the mind stops pushing the goal and picks it up again at the time you planned. A bedtime to-do list is exactly that kind of plan. You are not doing tomorrow's work at night. You are telling your brain where the work will be waiting.

The five-minute bedtime list

Five steps, about five minutes in total, which is also the time the study used.

Paper or app?

Both work. The study used pen and paper, and paper has one clear advantage: no screen. If you would rather use your phone, keep the session short, turn the brightness down or switch to dark mode, and close the app when the list is done instead of drifting into email.

Whatever you use, two things matter more than the tool: the list has a date at the top, and it lives in the place you look first in the morning.

How it works in RytePad

In RytePad's Daily Tasks, every date has its own list, so writing tomorrow's tasks means moving to tomorrow (the arrow next to the date, or the calendar) and typing them in. A star gives the one that matters a coloured edge. If the morning reminder is switched on, RytePad emails you at 6:30 am, in your time zone, on the day of tasks you planned ahead, and dark mode keeps a late session easy on the eyes. The daily planner page shows the whole routine.

Four ways the bedtime list goes wrong

When a list is not enough

A to-do list helps when tomorrow's tasks are what keep you awake. It will not fix sleep problems with other causes, from pain or late caffeine to anxiety, low mood or sleep apnoea.

If you regularly struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep for weeks at a time, see a doctor. For chronic insomnia, the American College of Physicians recommends cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as the first treatment to try, ahead of medication.

Bedtime to-do lists: your questions answered