Should you track morning and evening skincare in the same list?

For most people, two short lists work better than one long one: an AM skin routine and a PM skin routine. The steps, the order and the treatments differ between morning and evening, and a gap is easier to spot in a list of four than in a list of ten. One list is fine if your whole routine is three or four steps.

Why morning and evening are different routines

The American Academy of Dermatology gives one order for applying products: cleanse, apply any treatment, then moisturizer, sunscreen or both (AAD: apply skin care in a certain order). How that plays out depends on the time of day:

Morning ends with sunscreen, and often has a serum such as vitamin C.
Evening starts with removing makeup and sunscreen, and is where treatments like retinoids usually go. Cleveland Clinic puts retinols in the evening routine.
Some steps are shared. The same cleanser and moisturizer may appear in both.
Some steps are not daily. An exfoliant twice a week or a retinoid on some nights only.

Put all of that in one list and you get something like: cleanser, vitamin C, moisturizer, SPF, makeup remover, cleanser again, retinol, night cream. Eight lines, two of them called cleanser, and no way to tell at a glance whether this morning was complete.

When two lists work better

You have more than four or five steps in total. Two short lists are easier to read and to check than one long one.
You use treatments at night only. Retinol nights, spot treatments or a short prescription course sit with the evening steps, where they belong.
You want to see which half slips. Many people do the morning reliably and lose the evening, or the other way round. Separate lists make that obvious.
The order matters to you. Each list can hold its own sequence, from cleanser to sunscreen in the morning and from makeup removal to night cream at night (the morning order and the thin-to-thick rule).

When one list is enough

Your routine is minimal. Cleanse and moisturize twice a day plus sunscreen in the morning: three or four entries are easy to read together.
You only care that it happened. If you are not testing products or following a treatment plan, a single activity called Skincare logged once or twice a day may be all you need.
You want everything on one screen. A single list shows morning and evening side by side, which some people prefer for a quick daily check.

If you are unsure, start with two. Merging two routines later is a matter of moving a few activities; untangling one long list is more work.

Set up AM skin and PM skin in EasyRoutine

EasyRoutine is built around this split: routines hold activities, and the calendar shows one routine at a time. Choose the routine in the pills above the calendar to switch between them.

Tap Add routine and create AM skin. Add Cleanser, Vitamin C, Moisturizer and SPF as activities, in the order you use them.
Create PM skin with Remove makeup, Cleanser, Retinol and Night cream.
A product you use morning and evening, like the cleanser, gets an activity in each routine. That keeps each list complete and lets you see which half you skipped.
After each routine, tap + Log on the day and tick the steps you did.

Changed your mind? An activity can be moved to the other routine with Move to routine, and its logs come along. Logging is free; with Premium you can also give each routine its own times and a reminder.

EasyRoutine week view of an AM skin routine with tiles for cleanser, vitamin C, moisturizer and SPF on each morning, and the AM skin pill selected above the calendar next to PM skin — The morning routine on its own, one tap from the evening

What to watch for with two routines

Check the right routine. The calendar shows the routine selected in the pills, so an empty evening may just mean you are looking at AM skin.
The streak counts both. The Day streak counts any log of any activity, so one routine is enough to keep it going. Do not read it as "both routines done".
Name them clearly. Short names like AM skin and PM skin fit the pills and are hard to confuse.

For what goes in each list, see the morning skincare routine checklist and the evening skincare routine checklist. More about running several routines side by side: can I run multiple routines at once?