What to put on a bedside table

A bedside table is a strange piece of furniture. You interact with it twice a day, at the two moments when you're least capable of making decisions, and most people's contains whatever accumulated there over eighteen months.

Here's a shorter version of what belongs on it, and why.

The three things

A lamp you can reach without sitting up.

This is the whole reason the table exists. If you have to get out of bed to turn off the light, everything else on the table is academic. Warm bulb, dimmer if possible, switch on the cord rather than under the shade.

A glass of water.

Unglamorous, genuinely useful, and it removes one of the two most common reasons people get out of bed at 3am.

One book.

Not a stack. A stack is a to-do list. One book is an option.

That's it. Everything below is a judgement call.

The judgement calls

A clock — but the right kind

An analogue clock, or a digital one you can't read from the bed without deliberately looking.

The problem with a bright bedside clock isn't the light, it's the arithmetic. Waking at 3.40am and knowing it's 3.40am invites you to calculate how much sleep you have left, and that calculation is reliably worse for you than not knowing.

If you need an alarm, an alarm is fine. A permanently visible time display is a different object doing a different job.

Your phone — probably not

The strongest argument against the phone on the bedside table isn't blue light. It's that the phone is the single densest concentration of unfinished business you own, and you're putting it eighteen inches from your head.

The realistic compromise, if it has to be in the room for an alarm: face down, across the room, on a different surface. Not a rule — just far enough away that using it requires standing up.

A candle

Genuinely good if you'll use it, and a dust collector if you won't. The useful part isn't the scent, it's that lighting and extinguishing a candle brackets an evening with two small physical actions. Rituals mostly work because they're actions, not because they're meaningful.

Nothing else

Chargers, headphones, hand cream, half a packet of paracetamol, three pens, a receipt. All of it accumulates because a bedside table is the nearest horizontal surface to where you empty your pockets.

A small drawer or a shallow dish solves this permanently. The dish is better, because you can see when it's overflowing.

The surface itself

Two things matter more than the styling.

Height. It should be within a few centimetres of your mattress height. Too low and you knock things over reaching down; too high and it looms.

A lip, or not. Tables with a raised edge keep things on. Tables without one make you tidier by force. Both work. Flat-topped tables next to a bed that gets a lot of movement are a small ongoing source of annoyance.

What we'd actually change first

If you're looking at your bedside table and thinking about improving it, the order that tends to matter:

• Can you turn the light off without sitting up?
• Is there water?
• Is the phone somewhere else?
• Is there one book rather than seven?
• Everything else.

Most of this is free. The most expensive item on the list is a lamp with a cord switch.

Related: The case for a boring bedroom · Six rooms that get evening light right

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.