Ivy Lee Method

The Ivy Lee method is a to-do list with three constraints: six items, written the evening before, worked strictly in order. That is all of it. It is over a century old, it costs nothing, it takes five minutes a day, and it survives because it solves the two problems every task list has: the list is too long to finish, and the morning is spent deciding where to start.

The tool below writes tomorrow's list and refuses a seventh item. The rest of the page covers the story of where the method came from and how much of it is actually documented, why the constraints work, the two common variants, and where it does not fit.

Tomorrow's six

The 1918 story, and what is documented

The story as usually told: in 1918 Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, asked the publicity consultant Ivy Lee for a way to get more done. Lee asked for fifteen minutes with each executive, told them to write down the six most important things to do tomorrow in order of importance, to start on the first in the morning and not move to the second until it was finished, and to repeat every working day. He said to try it for three months and pay whatever it was worth. Schwab sent a cheque for $25,000, something over $400,000 in today's money.

How much of that is documented is less certain than the retellings suggest. Ivy Lee was real, a founder of modern public relations who advised the Rockefellers and Bethlehem Steel, and Scott Cutlip's history of public relations records the meeting with Schwab in 1918. The six-task instruction and the cheque appear in later productivity literature, retold and embellished, and the earliest sources for those details are secondary. James Clear, whose 2016 article did most to revive the method, notes that he could not find an earlier primary source and invites readers to supply one. The most defensible statement is that Lee advised Schwab in 1918, that a prioritised daily list of this kind was part of the advice, and that the $25,000 cheque is a story that may be true. The method does not depend on the cheque.

Why six, why in order, why the night before

• Six. A long list is a record of everything that could be done; six is a decision about what will be. The cap forces the sorting that most lists defer, and six is enough to fill a day without being enough to guarantee failure. The number itself is not sacred: the point is that the cap is small and fixed.
• In order. Ranking the six is the hard part and the useful part. It answers "what matters most" once, in the calm of the evening, rather than repeatedly through the day. Working the list in order removes the choice of what to do next, which is the choice that fills mornings with email.
• One at a time. Not moving to the second task until the first is done is single-tasking with a rule attached. The attention research on switching costs, covered in the monk mode guide, is the modern explanation for why this feels slower and is faster.
• The night before. Written at the end of the day, the list benefits from knowing what happened today and from not being written under the pressure of the morning inbox. The unfinished items are moved, not lost, which also makes the list a record of what keeps slipping.

The method is a daily version of the eat the frog principle, with the frog followed by five smaller animals in order of size, and it is the evening step that the weekly planner builds in.

The variants

Two later rules of thumb are often combined with the method, and the tool offers both.

The 1-3-5 rule, popularised by the careers site The Muse in the early 2010s, sizes the list rather than counting it: one big task, three medium, five small. It suits days that mix a substantial piece of work with administration, and it stops the six from being six big things. The tool labels the slots.

The two-minute rule, from David Allen's Getting Things Done (2001), says that anything that would take under two minutes should be done when it appears rather than listed. Applied alongside Ivy Lee it keeps the six for things that need a decision to start, and stops the list filling with items that cost more to track than to do. Allen's fuller system, with its capture, clarify and review stages, is the heavyweight alternative for people whose inputs exceed what six lines can hold.

A three-item version exists for days that are mostly meetings, and is honest about what such days can hold. The Eisenhower matrix is the sorting tool for deciding which six make the list when the candidate pool is thirty.

Where it does not fit

• Reactive roles. Support, on-call, front desk. The day is defined by what arrives. The method still works for the one or two things that must be done regardless, but six is fiction.
• Work with hard time slots. A task that can only happen at 2 p.m. cannot be worked "in order". Put it on the time-blocked calendar and keep the list for the movable work.
• Large projects. "Write the report" is not a task. The list needs the next concrete step: "draft section two". A list that repeats the same big item for a week is a sign the item was never broken down.
• Teams. It is a personal method. Shared work needs a shared board, and the six becomes a personal view of one's share of it.
• The order rule taken literally on a bad day. If task one is blocked by someone else, move to two. The rule is against drifting, not against judgment.

Its strength is its size. It can be run on an index card, it survives any software migration, and after a month the stack of cards is an honest record of what a job actually consists of, which is worth more than the method itself.

Key takeaways

• Six tasks, written the evening before, in order of importance, worked one at a time until done. Unfinished items move to tomorrow's list.
• Ivy Lee's 1918 advice to Charles Schwab at Bethlehem Steel is documented; the $25,000 cheque and the exact wording come from later retellings.
• The cap forces prioritisation, the order removes the morning's decision, and the one-at-a-time rule is single-tasking with a rule attached.
• The 1-3-5 rule sizes the list (one big, three medium, five small); the two-minute rule keeps trivial items off it.
• It does not fit reactive roles, fixed-time work or large undecomposed projects; those need a calendar or a next-step breakdown.
• After a month, the stack of lists is a record of what the job really consists of.