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About this tool
Back-calculate bedtime, wind-down, caffeine cutoff and last meal from a 4am or 5am shift start time.
This planner works backwards from an early shift start time to the exact minute you should be asleep, using shift start minus commute minus getting-ready time for the alarm, then subtracting your sleep target and your usual sleep-onset time for lights-out. It is built for people on 4am, 5am and 6am starts — bakers, warehouse and factory crews, hospital early shifts, delivery drivers and cabin crew. Defaults follow the AASM and Sleep Research Society consensus that adults need 7 or more hours a night, with an 8-hour caffeine cutoff and a 90-minute screen-dimming buffer.
Open Early Morning Shift Sleep Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Commute and getting-ready time are what usually eat the sleep, so they drive the whole schedule.
Caffeine, food, light and wind-down all get a clock time, not just bedtime.
Warns when a target falls below 7 hours or lands the bedtime absurdly early.
For a 4am start with a 30-minute commute and 45 minutes of getting ready, the alarm goes at 2:45am, so lights-out is 7:30pm the evening before if you want 7 hours of sleep plus about 15 minutes to fall asleep. Adjust for your own commute — every 10 minutes of travel is 10 minutes off the previous evening.
The same as everyone else: the AASM and Sleep Research Society recommend 7 or more hours per night for adults aged 18 to 60. Shift work does not lower the requirement, it just makes hitting it harder, which is why sleep debt accumulates across a run of earlies.
About 8 hours before lights-out. Caffeine has a half-life of roughly 5 hours in most adults, and a 2013 trial found a dose taken even 6 hours before bed still measurably reduced total sleep time. For a 7:30pm bedtime that means the last coffee is around 11:30am.
If the required bedtime lands before about 7pm it is usually easier to sleep a little less at night and add a short nap than to lie awake for an hour. A 20-minute nap avoids waking out of deep sleep; a full 90-minute cycle is the alternative if you have the time. Ongoing exhaustion on a shift pattern is worth raising with a doctor or occupational health rather than managing alone.