The Ivy Lee Method: a complete guide

What is the Ivy Lee Method?

The Ivy Lee Method is a daily planning system built around a single rule: at the end of each day, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow, put them in order of importance, and the next day work through them in sequence without moving to the next task until the previous one is complete.

Ivy Ledbetter Lee was an early American public relations consultant who in 1918 visited Charles Schwab, then the president of Bethlehem Steel and one of the wealthiest men in the country. Schwab told Lee his managers were not lacking knowledge; they were lacking the ability to execute on what they already knew. Lee offered to show him a method that would improve their productivity in fifteen minutes. Schwab agreed. Lee explained the method, asked him to try it for three months, and told him to pay whatever he thought it was worth. Three months later, Schwab sent Lee a cheque for $25,000, equivalent to several hundred thousand dollars today, and described it as one of the most profitable lessons he'd learned.

Whether or not every detail of this story is accurate, the method itself has endured precisely because it works with how human attention actually functions rather than against it.

The five steps

At the end of each working day, write down the six most important tasks you want to accomplish tomorrow. Not everything you could do. Not a brain dump of your entire backlog. The six things that matter most.

Order them by importance. The most important task goes first, the second most important goes second, and so on. This ordering decision, made the evening before, removes the daily cost of deciding what to do next.

The next day, start with task one. Work on it until it's complete. Then move to task two.

Only move forward when the current task is finished. This is the constraint that gives the method its discipline. You don't jump between tasks, work on whatever feels appealing, or convince yourself that parallel progress counts.

At the end of the day, move any unfinished tasks to the next day's list. If a task kept not getting done, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

That's the entire method.

Why it works

The six-task limit forces genuine prioritisation. There's an enormous difference between choosing what to do from an open-ended list and being forced to pick six things. The limit is a constraint that does cognitive work for you. If you can only put six things on tomorrow's list, you're forced to ask which six things actually matter. Most people find this question harder than it looks, and answering it the night before means the answer has been considered in advance rather than avoided until the morning.

Single-tasking reduces decision fatigue throughout the day. Once you're working, the next task is always clear. You don't decide what to do next; you finish what you're doing and move to the task below it on the list. Baumeister's research on decision fatigue shows that every decision depletes the same cognitive resource, including trivially small ones. Eliminating the recurring "what should I work on now?" decision preserves capacity for the actual work.

Priority ordering the evening before removes morning resistance. The hardest time to commit to a difficult task is when you're staring at it fresh in the morning. Deciding the night before, when you're reflecting on the day rather than defending against it, tends to produce clearer thinking about what matters.

The carry-forward rule creates honest accountability. If the same task migrates to tomorrow's list for the third day running, the method makes that visible in a way that a sprawling to-do list doesn't. You have to consciously put it on the list again rather than just letting it drift. This is similar in spirit to the bullet journal's migration process: the friction of deliberately carrying something forward is a useful prompt for deciding whether it actually belongs there.

Choosing the right six tasks

The method provides the structure. You provide the judgement. A list of six low-stakes tasks will be completed efficiently and signify very little. The value of the Ivy Lee Method is proportional to the quality of the tasks you choose.

A few frameworks that pair well with the method:

The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks by urgency and importance into four quadrants. Important and urgent tasks need doing now. Important but not urgent tasks are where the most valuable proactive work lives. Urgent but not important tasks are candidates for delegation. Neither urgent nor important tasks are candidates for cutting. The Ivy Lee list should contain mostly tasks from the important-but-not-urgent quadrant: the strategic, high-value work that's always getting crowded out by the urgent. If your list is dominated by fires, that's diagnostic information about how your work is structured.

The energy model considers not just what's important but when you have the capacity for it. A six-task list that front-loads your most cognitively demanding work in the morning and schedules lighter tasks for the afternoon reflects how human energy actually works rather than treating all tasks as interchangeable. The most important task isn't necessarily the hardest, but it's worth considering whether your first task of the day requires the kind of attention you have in the morning.

The MoSCoW method (covered separately) identifies what must happen today, what should happen, what could happen, and what won't. The Ivy Lee list maps naturally onto Must and Should items.

Limitations

It doesn't handle reactive work. If your job involves a significant volume of incoming requests, emails, and interruptions that need same-day responses, six pre-planned tasks don't account for that reality. The method works best when you have meaningful control over your day. For highly reactive roles, time blocking a portion of the day for the six-task list while leaving space for reactive work tends to work better than applying the method to your full day.

It can be too rigid for complex projects. Some work involves a single large project that benefits from extended deep focus rather than six discrete tasks. In those cases, the six-task structure can feel forced. Adapting it to "six sub-tasks or focus areas within my main project" is a reasonable modification.

It doesn't help with prioritisation itself. The method assumes you know what matters most. If identifying priorities is itself the problem, working with a GTD-style system to get everything out of your head and organised first tends to make the nightly list much easier to compile.

Six might be the wrong number for you. Some people find three tasks is more realistic given their actual capacity and the complexity of what they're working on. Others find eight tasks works better. The number is less important than the underlying disciplines: decide the night before, set a limit, work in order, finish before moving on.

Ivy Lee and other systems

GTD: GTD gives you a full picture of your commitments. The Ivy Lee list is what you pull from that picture each day. Six tasks from a well-maintained GTD system is a powerful combination: the larger system ensures nothing gets lost; the Ivy Lee method ensures today's most important things actually get done.

Time blocking: Time blocking plans when you'll do things; Ivy Lee decides what those things are. You can schedule your six Ivy Lee tasks into specific blocks throughout the day, combining the what with the when.

Pomodoro Technique: Pomodoro structures how you work through each task in intervals. The two methods operate at different scales and combine naturally: Ivy Lee determines the task order, Pomodoro provides the focus structure within each task.

Bullet journal: The Ivy Lee list maps directly onto the bullet journal's daily log. Writing your six tasks the evening before, prioritised and ready for the next morning, is a natural extension of the daily log's evening migration process.

Task management basics: If you're new to any kind of task management, the Ivy Lee Method is one of the gentlest entry points, since it requires almost no setup and builds on habits most people already have.

Frequently asked questions

Why six tasks specifically?

Six is the number Ivy Lee settled on, and it's remained the convention. The specific number matters less than having a strict limit that forces you to prioritise. If three or four tasks is more realistic for your work, use three or four. The point is the constraint, not the exact count.

What if I finish all six tasks?

Add new tasks from your broader list, starting with whatever is next in priority. The six-task limit applies to tomorrow's list, not to how many tasks you can do in a day. Finishing all six and adding more is a good day.

Should I include personal tasks or only work tasks?

That's up to you and depends on how you think about your day. Some people keep work and personal tasks on separate lists. Others find a unified list more effective. The method works either way.

What if one task is too big to complete in a day?

Break it down. A task that can't be completed in a working day probably isn't specific enough. "Write the report" is a project. "Write the first draft of the executive summary" is a task. The more concrete and bounded the task, the more useful it is on the list.

How does this differ from a normal to-do list?

Three main differences. The strict limit forces you to prioritise rather than capture everything. The ordering rule means you decide the sequence in advance rather than working on whatever feels right in the moment. The single-tasking rule prevents task-switching, which most research suggests reduces both quality and speed. A normal to-do list is just a list; the Ivy Lee Method is a discipline built around a list.

Is the Ivy Lee Method good for ADHD?

The simplicity is a genuine strength. Six items, in order, one at a time, is far less overwhelming than an open-ended list, and the absence of complex maintenance removes the executive function overhead that kills most productivity systems. The challenge is that ADHD can make it hard to commit to working through tasks in order when a different task feels more appealing in the moment. Pairing it with a Pomodoro timer can help, as can choosing tasks that match your energy level at different times of day.

The Ivy Lee Method was developed by Ivy Ledbetter Lee around 1918. The account of his work with Charles Schwab is widely cited, though primary sources from that period are limited.