Ivy Lee Method: Six Tasks a Day, in Strict Order

The Ivy Lee method is not a longer to-do list but a shorter one: at the end of each workday you write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow, rank them, and the next day you work through them in strict order. Task two waits until task one is done. Whatever is still open in the evening moves to the next day’s list. That is every rule the method has, and its strictness is the whole point.

Three things make it work: a hard cap, a fixed order, and a decision made the night before. All three run through Priya, who owns a bookkeeping practice in Minneapolis with 34 small business clients and has carried one email on her list for six weeks while checking off about 14 other items a day. Below: the story, five steps, her two weeks in numbers, three quiet mistakes, a comparison with four other methods and a template.

What the Ivy Lee method is: six tasks, one order

The Ivy Lee method says a workday should start with a decision, not with a pile. That decision happens the evening before, when the day is over and you know what is still open. It has two parts. Which six tasks matter tomorrow? And in what order? Everything else waits.

The rules, as the story is usually told, fit on an index card:

1. 01At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow. No more than six.
2. 02Rank them in order of their true importance, the most important at the top.
3. 03Tomorrow, work only on task one until it is finished. Then move to task two.
4. 04Handle the rest of the list the same way. Anything unfinished goes on a new list of six for the following day.
5. 05Repeat this every working day.

It sounds too simple, which is why people underrate it. It demands two things a normal list never asks for. It demands that you cut before you start. And it demands that you stay put when task one gets sticky. Whoever keeps both promises works on fewer things at once and still finishes more of what counts.

No categories, no colors, no time estimates, no software. In short: the Ivy Lee method is not a technique for collecting tasks. It is a technique for leaving them out. The list is the tool. The cap is the method.

Who was Ivy Lee? The story behind the $25,000 check

The method is named after Ivy Ledbetter Lee, an American consultant who lived from 1877 to 1934. The story is set around 1918 and usually goes like this. Charles M. Schwab, then running Bethlehem Steel and one of the best known industrialists in the country, wanted his executives to get more done. Lee asked for 15 minutes with each of them. In those 15 minutes he explained the six tasks and the fixed order. Nothing else.

When Schwab asked about the fee, Lee reportedly waved it off. Schwab should try the method for three months and then pay whatever he thought it was worth. Three months later a check for $25,000 arrived, several hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. Not bad for a method that fits on a scrap of paper.

A fair concession belongs here. The story is well told and thinly documented. It survives mostly in retellings, and in the 2010s the writer James Clear brought it back to a wide audience. For you, that hardly matters. The method does not have to be true because Schwab paid for it. It has to work when you try it tomorrow.

The key principle of the Ivy Lee method: a limit you cannot negotiate

Why six and not ten? The number is not a law of nature. What matters is not the six but the fact that the limit is smaller than your list. Three principles sit inside the method, and you can test each one on its own.

A cap forces a decision

An open list grows. Every email, every call and every idea gets a line, and no line ever has to compete with another. A list with six slots has a bouncer at the door. Whoever wants to add a seventh task has to throw one out or push it to the day after tomorrow. That means: prioritizing stops being something you will do someday. It happens every evening, in a few minutes, under gentle pressure.

An order replaces switching

Most workdays fall apart not from too much work but from switching. You start the proposal, answer an email, take a call, and need ten minutes to find your place again. The Ivy Lee method does not ban interruptions. No method could. It only tells you where to return: to task one, until it is done. Whoever keeps the order never has to decide again during the day what comes next.

The night before takes the bargaining out of the morning

At 8 a.m. the pull toward the easy stuff is strongest. A list written the night before takes that choice away, because it was made while you still remembered why task one matters. In short: you decide in the evening and you work in the morning. Doing both in the same morning is something almost nobody manages.

How to use the Ivy Lee method in five steps

The method takes about ten minutes in the evening and none during the day. Four of the five steps happen the night before. Most guides skip that part, which is why the list so often collapses by 10 a.m.

1. 01

   Close out today, two minutes

   Go through today’s list and mark each task with a check or an arrow for carryover. Anything getting its third arrow gets shrunk, handed off or deleted in step three.

2. 02

   Collect candidates, three minutes

   Write down everything that could happen tomorrow: carryovers, promises, prep for meetings, steps toward your weekly goal. The list may still have twelve items here. Cutting comes next.

3. 03

   Cut to six, three minutes

   Ask two questions of every candidate. Does it move my weekly goal? Is someone waiting on it? Anything that passes neither goes to a holding list. Each of the six must be finishable in one day.

4. 04

   Set the order, two minutes

   Number them one to six. Slot one goes to the task with the biggest effect on your weekly goal, not the one with the nearest deadline. Fixed appointments go in the margin with a time. They are not tasks on the list.

5. 05

   Work from the top tomorrow

   Start with task one and stay with it until it is done. Interruptions are allowed, switching is not. After every meeting and every call, return to the highest open task, not the most comfortable one.

Step three is the uncomfortable one. Cutting twelve candidates to six feels like abandoning work. You are only deciding it will not happen tomorrow. An open list never makes that distinction.

Step five is the strict one. What do you do when task one stalls because you are waiting on an answer? Then it is blocked for now, and you move to task two. As soon as the answer comes in, you go back. Whoever dodges every time a task gets hard ends the day with five started tasks and none finished. Personal kanban with a WIP limit tackles exactly that pile by capping how many tasks may be open at once.

Example: Priya’s two weeks with six tasks a day

Priya is 41 and runs a bookkeeping practice in Minneapolis with one part-time assistant. She closes the books for 34 small businesses, a bakery and two dental offices among them. Most still pay by the hour, so every month ends with Priya chasing invoices. Her goal for the year is clear. By December 31, 20 of her 34 clients should be on flat monthly packages. In early October, eight are.

Her task app had 31 open items at the start of October. Every evening she checked off about 14, and every morning about as many new ones appeared. One item had been on the list for six weeks: write the email that offers monthly packages to every hourly client. Something more urgent always came first: a 1099 question, a broken bank feed, two extensions due October 15. Was she busy? Without question. But nobody ever called to ask where the package email was.

On her first evening with the method she wrote down twelve candidates and cut half of them. She put the first draft of the package email in slot one. Then she kept count for two weeks, in a notebook next to her keyboard:

The number that jumps out first is the wrong one. Priya checked off far fewer tasks per day, 4.8 instead of about 14. Whoever counts only checkmarks reads that as a step backward. The number that matters sits two lines lower: slot one was done by evening on nine of ten days. The package email, pushed back for six weeks, went out on day four.

What happened to the other tasks? Some got done between two calls. Some traveled along for three evenings and were deleted without anyone noticing. Some solved themselves. That means: a shorter list did not move less. It moved the right things.

One day went badly. On Thursday of the second week a client discovered a payroll error from August, and Priya spent seven hours fixing it with the payroll provider. She finished exactly one item on her list and carried five over. On Friday, task one was still the first thing she finished. The method does not prevent bad days. It only makes sure the next day does not start with 36 items.

Does the Ivy Lee method work? The three mistakes nobody notices

Yes, if you keep the two promises. The method rarely fails for lack of discipline. It fails because of three small drifts, and each one feels like good planning while it happens. Whoever knows them spots them on Friday. Whoever does not blames their willpower and looks for the next method. Which of the three do you recognize?

Mistake one: six lines that are not tasks

“Website” is not a task. It is a project. “Taxes” is an area of life. Six lines like that cannot be finished in a day, so the whole list moves to tomorrow and within a week the method is dead. Every line needs a result you can check off tonight. Not “package email” but “package email, first draft, one page.”

Mistake two: the urgent task in slot one

The temptation makes sense. The extension filing is due Thursday, so it goes to the top. But a task with a deadline gets done anyway, because someone is waiting and will ask. The package email had no deadline and no sender. It only gets done if it gets the best slot of the day.

Mistake three: the endless carryover

Carrying unfinished work forward is well meant and dangerous over time. A task that travels along for five days blocks one of six slots. Priya added one rule of her own: after three carryovers, a task gets smaller, gets handed off or gets deleted. Whoever carries tasks forward without deciding about them soon has a list of 31 items again, just spread over four days.

Ivy Lee vs. Eisenhower Matrix, Eat the Frog, 1-3-5 and 3-3-3

No time management method is the best one. Each solves a specific problem, and the Ivy Lee method solves a different one than the Eisenhower Matrix or Eat the Frog. So the question is not which method wins. The question is which problem you have right now.

What is the difference between Ivy Lee and the Eisenhower Matrix? The matrix sorts, but it does not rank. It tells you that four tasks are important and not urgent, but not which of them comes first tomorrow. That is exactly where Ivy Lee starts. Whoever combines the two sorts the backlog with the matrix on Sunday and fills the six slots every evening from the important but not urgent box first.

Eat the Frog is, at its core, Ivy Lee with a single slot. The frog is task one, and the method stops where Ivy Lee keeps going, with tasks two through six. If you eat your frog by 9 a.m. and then drown in your inbox, you need the other five slots. Brian Tracy built a whole book around the frog, and an Eat That Frog summary covers the other 20 principles in it.

The 1-3-5 rule plans nine tasks a day: one big, three medium, five small. It is honest about small stuff, but it has no order. The 3-3-3 rule, a format often credited to the writer Oliver Burkeman, splits the day differently: three hours on your most important project, three shorter urgent tasks, three maintenance chores. It fits on top of an Ivy Lee list: slot one becomes the three-hour project.

Where the Ivy Lee method falls short

The Ivy Lee method is a good method. It is just not built for every day. Four limits deserve an honest mention:

• It does not tell you what is important. Without a weekly or monthly goal, slot one is assigned by feel, and feel picks whatever is loudest.
• It fits poorly on days packed with meetings. If you spend eight hours in calls, there is no room for six tasks. Then it is two, and that is fine.
• It has no rule for emergencies. A client’s payroll error does not care about your list. Handle it, then return to the highest open task.
• It does not break down projects. A six-week project has to be cut into daily steps before it can land on the list.

For couples and families it works on a small scale too. Whoever agrees on Friday night on three things for Saturday, in order, skips the Saturday argument. In short: Eisenhower cleans up the list, Ivy Lee turns it into a day, and Eat the Frog protects the first hour.

The Ivy Lee method in your goal chain: year, quarter, month, week, day

The method has a gap, and Lee never closed it. It tells you to write down the six most important tasks. It does not tell you how to measure importance. At Bethlehem Steel every executive knew his mandate. If you run your own business or a family, that mandate is often missing. Then gut feeling decides in the evening, and a tired gut picks whatever is most annoying.

A goal chain closes the gap. It does not derive slot one from feeling but from the next goal up. For Priya it looks like this:

• Year: By December 31, 20 of 34 clients are on flat monthly packages, so January starts without chasing hourly invoices.
• Quarter, October to December: Package page finished, offer sent to all 26 hourly clients, at least twelve clients switched by December 15.
• Month of October: Package email sent to the first ten clients, at least four calls booked, pricing table tested with two friendly clients.
• Week: Write and send the package email, file the two October 15 extensions, fix the broken bank feed for the bakery.
• Day: six tasks, with the first draft of the package email in slot one.

Each level answers the question of the one below it. The weekly goal tells you what belongs in slot one tonight. That means: the ten minutes in the evening shrink to five, because the hardest decision was already made on Sunday. How to break a yearly goal down to that level is covered in how to achieve goals.

In Gaapp, daily goals hang on weekly goals, and weekly goals hang on the month. For the Ivy Lee method that means slot one becomes a daily goal that is visibly tied to a weekly goal. The other five slots need no system at all, paper is enough. How to phrase a daily goal so you can check it off by evening is explained under daily goals.

Ivy Lee method template: one card, six lines, one carryover column

The template fits on an index card, just like Lee’s. The entries show Priya’s first Monday, so you can see how specific a line should be.

Three extra rules apply in the evening. A task with nothing in the third column needs a very good reason to be on the list at all. A task carried over for the third time gets smaller or disappears. And slot one never holds a task whose only reason is that someone is waiting.

If you already work with a classic to-do list, you do not have to throw it away. It becomes the holding list you pull six items from each evening. Nothing on it is forgotten. It is just not tomorrow’s turn.

Three questions before you start tomorrow:

• Do you know right now, without looking, what sits in slot one tomorrow?
• Is there a task on your list that has been traveling along for more than a week?
• Could you check off every single line on your list within one day?

Whoever cannot answer one of these cleanly does not need a better app. They need ten minutes in the evening. In short: the Ivy Lee method is not a list of things you could do. It is a decision about what you will do first tomorrow. Priya set a dozen checkmarks a day for six weeks and never wrote the package email. With six slots, it went out on day four.

Frequently asked questions about the Ivy Lee method