How Do Do It Tomorrow and Ulysses Contracts Work Together?

What each one is actually for

Do It Tomorrow

Do It Tomorrow, the productivity method from Mark Forster, is built around a single hard rule rather than a system of priorities or categories: today's list was already decided — usually written the night before or first thing in the morning — and anything that shows up after that point does not get to join it, no matter how urgent it feels in the moment. It goes onto a separate list for tomorrow instead. Forster's diagnosis was specific: most task systems fail not because people lack a list but because the list gets silently rewritten all day by whatever just arrived, until the actual plan for today is just whatever felt most pressing in each passing moment. Only a genuine emergency — something that causes real, concrete damage if it waits until tomorrow — is allowed to break the rule. Everything else waits its turn, on paper, until tomorrow's list gets built.

Ulysses Contracts

A Ulysses contract, named for the moment in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus has his crew bind him to the ship's mast before they sail near the sirens — creatures whose song he knows will make him want to steer the ship straight into the rocks — is any arrangement you make with yourself in advance that removes your own future ability to make a choice you can currently predict you'll want to make, and currently believe you shouldn't. The concrete versions are varied but share the same shape: put real money on the line that you lose if you don't follow through, tell people publicly so backing out costs you socially, or physically remove the tempting option so it's not there to choose in the moment — freezing a credit card in a block of ice, giving your phone to someone else during work hours. The contract doesn't ask future-you to be stronger. It removes the choice future-you would otherwise be free to make badly.

What you get out of pairing them

A plan decided this morning, with a clear head, that survives an entire day of interruptions intact is the specific thing Do It Tomorrow delivers — most plans don't survive contact with the first three things that feel urgent, and this one does because nothing new gets a vote once the day has started. A Ulysses contract delivers something structurally different: it removes the need for willpower at the single moment willpower is least available, because the choice that would have required it was already taken off the table by a decision made earlier, under no pressure at all.

What Do It Tomorrow rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Closed lists reduce overwhelm practitioner report
  A fixed bounded list of tasks rather than an ever-growing open list reduces the felt overwhelm of an infinite to-do list.
• Deferred capture protects commitment practitioner report
  Writing newly arriving tasks onto tomorrow's list rather than acting on them immediately protects today's already-committed plan from being derailed by reactivity.

What Ulysses Contracts rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Removing future optionality protects present intent randomised trials
  Binding a future choice through an external cost or barrier prevents a later moment of weaker willpower from overriding a decision made while thinking clearly.
• Temporal discounting erodes willpower randomised trials
  People systematically undervalue future consequences relative to immediate temptation which is exactly the bias a binding precommitment is designed to neutralize.

Where they actually meet

The version of you that decides something with a clear head is not the version either practice trusts to also carry it out — both are built for the version that shows up later, under pressure or temptation, and doesn't get a vote on renegotiating the decision. Do It Tomorrow builds its wall out of tomorrow's list; a Ulysses contract builds its wall out of money, publicity, or physically removing the option. Different material, same wall, same reason for building one.

The principle underneath both

The version of you making a decision with a clear head, ahead of time, is a better judge than the version of you making it under pressure or temptation in the moment — and because that gap between the two versions is predictable, it's worth building a structure now that the pressured version can't talk their way around later. A task deferred to tomorrow's list and a phone locked away during work hours are doing the identical job: removing a choice from the moment it would otherwise be made badly.

What that makes the real goal

The actual target, once you see it this way, is protecting a decision made by a clear-headed version of yourself from being overturned by a compromised, reactive, or tempted version of yourself later — whether the threat to that decision arrives in the next five minutes, as a new task, or in three weeks, as a craving.

Other practices that serve the same goal

The economist Thomas Schelling wrote extensively about exactly this problem under the name self-command, cataloguing real strategies people use to bind their future selves — throwing away the last cigarette in the pack so there's nothing left to smoke at 2 a.m., giving a friend cash to hold and only return once a goal is hit — and his work helped found an entire academic literature on commitment devices. A more recent version of the same idea has actual field-trial evidence behind it: a study by Gine, Karlan, and Zinman offered smokers in the Philippines a savings account that only returned their money, plus a bonus, if a urine test six months later confirmed they'd quit — smokers offered the account were significantly more likely to quit than those who weren't, a randomized result showing that a real financial Ulysses contract measurably changes behavior, not just willingness to try.

A tradition that already does this

The Rule of Saint Benedict, the sixth-century document that structures life in Benedictine monasteries, laid out a fixed daily schedule — the horarium — assigning specific hours to prayer, work, meals, and rest, decided once by the community's rule rather than renegotiated day to day. A request or task that arose outside its proper hour wasn't slotted into whatever was happening; it waited for its designated time, the same defer-to-its-proper-place logic Do It Tomorrow runs on. And the schedule itself functioned as a binding commitment nobody could talk their way out of in a weak moment, the same structural role a Ulysses contract plays now, centuries before either modern technique had a name.

Using Do It Tomorrow's Defer List as a Daily Ulysses Contract

A Ulysses contract usually operates at the scale of weeks or months — a savings account, a public pledge — but the same binding logic works at the scale of a single day if you treat Do It Tomorrow's rule with the same seriousness. Write today's list the night before, while you're not yet under any of tomorrow's pressure, and treat that list the way you'd treat money on the line: nothing gets added to it during the day, full stop, the same hard boundary a financial contract enforces with a bank instead of a piece of paper. The list you wrote last night is the clear-headed version of you binding tomorrow's pressured version to a decision it can't renegotiate task by task.

Using a Ulysses Contract to Enforce the Rule Do It Tomorrow Can't Enforce Alone

Do It Tomorrow's actual weak point is that the rule relies on you, in the moment, choosing to write the new task down instead of just doing it — and a rule that depends on in-the-moment discipline is exactly the kind of rule a Ulysses contract is built to replace. Add real stakes: tell a colleague or partner the rule explicitly and ask them to call it out the moment they see you break it mid-day, or put a small amount of money aside that you only get back at the end of a week where the defer list held every single day. The rule stops depending on your discipline at 2 p.m. on a hard Tuesday and starts depending on a structure that doesn't care how you feel at 2 p.m. on a hard Tuesday.

The Slack Message That Wasn't an Emergency

You wrote today's list last night: three real pieces of work, decided while nobody was asking you for anything. It's 10 a.m. and a colleague pings you with something that feels urgent — it has a deadline mentioned in it, it has your name in the message, every alarm in your head says handle it now. You pull up the rule you set for yourself: nothing not on last night's list gets touched today unless it's a genuine emergency, and you ask yourself the actual test question — will real damage happen if this waits until tomorrow's list? It won't. You write it on tomorrow's page instead of opening the thread, and you feel the same specific discomfort Odysseus is described as feeling straining against the ropes while the sirens sang — the pull toward the thing you decided, ahead of time, not to do. The list you wrote last night, when nobody was pinging you, was the version of you with the clearer head. This morning's version just has to not undo it.

When this is worth reaching for

Your day keeps getting reorganized by whatever landed in your inbox an hour ago, and by lunchtime you can't remember what you'd actually planned to do this morning. Or you've made a decision — quit something, start something, stop doing something specific — while thinking clearly, and you already suspect there's a predictable future moment where you'll want to talk yourself out of it. Either situation is the moment to write the rule down in advance, on paper or with an actual stake attached, rather than trusting that the calmer version of you making the decision now will still be in charge later.

Where this does not apply

If new tasks arriving during the day are genuinely often urgent — a job where real emergencies happen several times a week, not just feel urgent — a rigid defer-everything rule will misfire constantly and probably get abandoned; the technique assumes most 'urgent' interruptions aren't actually emergencies, and that assumption doesn't hold in every job. And a Ulysses contract with real financial or social stakes is the wrong first move for a decision you haven't actually tested your own follow-through on yet — locking in a harsh penalty before you know whether a lighter version of the commitment would have worked risks a costly, demoralizing failure on something a smaller first attempt might have handled fine.

What the evidence does and does not support

The mechanism behind both practices — deciding in advance, tied to a specific trigger, rather than deciding in the moment — has strong randomized-trial support under the research name implementation intentions, developed largely through Peter Gollwitzer's studies, which consistently show that a specific advance plan closes the gap between intending to do something and actually doing it better than intention alone. Do It Tomorrow's own defer-list rule hasn't itself been through a controlled trial; its support is close to entirely anecdotal, from Mark Forster's own writing and practitioner reports. Ulysses contracts have firmer backing on the financial-stakes end specifically — the Philippines smoking-cessation trial mentioned above is a real randomized result — but that evidence is about money-backed commitment devices for addiction, not about the softer, unstaked version most people actually use day to day, so treat the strength of that evidence as sitting mostly behind the harder, higher-stakes versions of the contract, not the whole category.