Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.
Two-week evening and sleep diary baseline
Memory exaggerates bad nights, and it is hard to change an evening you have never actually written down. Fourteen days of a simple diary, covering what you did in the last two hours before bed, roughly when you fell asleep, any wakings and how busy your mind felt, gives you a baseline to judge every later change against.
First tasks
- Set up a diary page from the sleep review template
- Add a 0 to 10 busy-mind score and a line for the last two evening hours
- Fill in the diary within half an hour of getting up for fourteen days
- Work out the two-week averages and write them at the top
Map of what keeps your mind busy at night
Racing thoughts are rarely random: for most people they cluster into a few themes, such as tomorrow's to-do list, replaying a conversation, money, a relative's health or a vague sense of dread. Naming your own top themes, and when they tend to show up, tells you which wind-down tools to reach for, because a to-do loop and a replayed argument need different handling.
First tasks
- List every racing thought you remember from the last two weeks
- Group the thoughts into three to six themes and label each one
- Mark each theme as planning, replaying, worrying or other
- Circle the two themes that came up most often
Fixed wake time and a bedtime window
Going to bed early after a bad night feels sensible but usually means more time lying awake with a busy mind. Anchoring the morning, with the same wake time seven days a week to within about an hour, and treating bedtime as a window you enter only when sleepy, gives the body clock something steady to work with.
First tasks
- Choose a wake time you can keep on workdays and days off
- Set a bedtime window from the sleep times in your diary
- Set one alarm for the wake time and leave it on at weekends
- Write your rule for the morning after a bad night
