The Ivy Lee Method: How It Works and When It Doesn't

The Ivy Lee method is a daily planning routine with one rule that does most of the work: you only get six tasks. At the end of each workday, you write down the six most important things to do tomorrow, put them in order of importance, and the next day you work through them from the top. Whatever is left over moves to the next list.

That is the whole method. The rest of this article covers where it came from, why a rule this small can change how a day goes, and the situations where it is the wrong tool.

The five steps

In its original form, the routine has five steps:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write more than six.
2. Rank those six items in order of their true importance.
3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until it is finished, then move to the second.
4. Approach the rest of the list the same way. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six for the following day.
5. Repeat this every working day.

Two details matter more than they look. The list is written the evening before, so the hardest decision (what matters most) is made when you are not already being pulled in five directions. And the instruction is to work on the first task only, until it is done. The ranking only means something if you actually follow it.

Where the story comes from

In 1918, Charles M. Schwab, who ran Bethlehem Steel, asked the consultant Ivy Lee how to get more done. Lee gave him the routine above on a single sheet of paper and told him to try it with his executives. He asked for nothing up front: Schwab could pay whatever he thought it was worth once the results were in. A few months later, Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000, which is roughly half a million dollars in today’s money.

Lee himself was a real and well-known figure, a pioneer of public relations, and the routine attached to his name has lasted more than a century because people who try it tend to keep it.

Why a hard limit helps

A to-do list with forty items has no opinion about what matters. Every item looks equally available, so the day goes to whatever is loudest or easiest. A cap of six forces the choice at planning time instead of leaving it to your mood at 2 p.m.

There is some research behind the underlying habit, though none of it tests the Ivy Lee method by name. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer’s work on “implementation intentions”, in which people decide in advance when and how they will act, has been reviewed across dozens of studies and finds that pre-deciding makes follow-through more likely. A ranked list written the night before is a form of pre-deciding. We are not aware of a controlled trial of the six-task method itself, so claims that it “increases productivity by X%” are not something you should trust.

Ranking by importance rather than urgency is the other half. Urgent things announce themselves. Important things, like the draft that needs two uninterrupted hours, rarely do, and they are the ones that slip when nobody forces them to the top.

What makes it work in practice

• Write the list at the end of the day. If you do it in the morning, you will plan around whatever just landed in your inbox.
• Make each task finishable. “Work on the report” can absorb a day. “Draft the findings section” cannot hide.
• Keep the other tasks somewhere else. The method assumes a separate place for everything that did not make the cut. Without that, people either stuff the list past six or lose track of things and stop trusting the system.
• Don’t re-rank in the middle of the day unless something truly changes. Constant re-ranking is how the list turns back into a menu.

When it doesn’t work

The method is easy to praise and worth being honest about where it breaks.

• Interrupt-driven jobs. If your day is mostly reacting to requests, such as support, on-call, or being a manager with an open door, a plan made the night before will not survive. The method still helps you protect one or two important things, but do not expect a clean run through six.
• Work that depends on other people’s calendars. Meetings and handoffs set the shape of your day. You may need to combine the list with a calendar. We compare the two in Ivy Lee method vs time blocking.
• Tasks of very different sizes. One six-hour task and five five-minute tasks are not a balanced list. Break up the big one or accept that it is your day.
• Perfectionism about the ranking. Spending twenty minutes agonizing over whether something is number three or number four defeats the point. A reasonable order, followed, beats a perfect order ignored.

Using it in an app

You can run the method on a paper index card, and plenty of people do. An app earns its place when you want Planned Tasks, the daily cap and a record of what you finished kept in one place and the same on your phone and computer. That is what Ivy Lee Tasks is built around: a hard limit of six for today, a backlog for everything else, and no streaks or badges to make planning feel like a game.

If you want to see whether the method suits you, try it for five working days before deciding. One week is enough to tell whether ranking the night before changes how your mornings start.