Coaching practices for The Not to Do List Before Bed

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For The Not to Do List Before Bed, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• The moment the lights go out my brain starts running tomorrow’s to-do list on a loop
• The second my head hits the pillow my mind starts up
• I lie awake at night with tomorrow’s undone work circling in my head, and then I start each morning cold, burning my best focus just deciding where to begin instead of already knowing.
• I want to stop the bedtime scroll, but if I just lie there with nothing my mind races, so I keep reaching for the phone again because I don’t know what else to do with that wind-down hour.
• I keep telling myself I’ll cut back on the things that drain me, but every single time the moment comes I cave and say yes again

Practices that may help

1. Offload cognitive load with a bedtime worry journal
   Write tomorrow’s to-do list and any intrusive worries before bed — externalized thoughts stop competing for attention at sleep onset.
   The Wind-Down Routine: Engineering Your Path to Sleep
2. Schedule a worry time earlier in the day
   Contain bedtime worry by giving anxious thoughts a specific earlier window, then postponing them at night.
   CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I), Made Practical
3. The Not-To-Do List
   The not-to-do list is a set of behaviors, tasks, and commitments you commit to stopping or refusing — permanently. Tim Ferriss argues that elimination is more valuable than optimization because low-leverage activities consume time that no amount of efficiency can recover. The approach is largely practitioner advice backed by mechanistic reasoning about opportunity cost and attention.
4. Write tomorrow’s six most important tasks the evening before
   Before the day ends, write exactly six tasks — no more — for the next day, ordered by their importance to you.
   The Ivy Lee Method, Made Practical
5. Replace phone scrolling with a physical book at bedtime
   A physical book provides relaxation without blue light, notifications, or the variable-reward loop.
   The Phone-Free Bedroom
6. Write and commit to a standing not-to-do list
   Turn elimination candidates into an explicit, reviewed list of permanent refusals.
   The Not-To-Do List
7. Set a screen cutoff time
   Pick a consistent hour to put screens away and protect the wind-down window.
   The Digital Sunset
8. Work from a closed daily list
   Write today’s task list before the day begins, then refuse to add new items to it.
   Do It Tomorrow, Made Practical
9. The Wind-Down Routine: Engineering Your Path to Sleep
   A wind-down routine works by gradually reducing physiological arousal — light levels, core temperature, cognitive load, and sympathetic nervous system activity — in the 60–90 minutes before bed. The individual components (light reduction, cool room, worry journaling, avoiding screens) each have mechanistic or clinical support; the bundled routine itself is practitioner-established rather than RCT-proven as a whole.
10. Anchor the wind-down with a consistent starting cue
    A repeated pre-sleep ritual — a specific tea, a book, a certain playlist — becomes a conditioned cue that induces sleepiness over time.
    The Wind-Down Routine: Engineering Your Path to Sleep

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