The Ivy Lee Method: Six Tasks, In Order, Written the Night Before

The Ivy Lee method is a daily planning rule with three moving parts. At the end of each workday you write down the six most important things for tomorrow, you rank them by importance, and you work them one at a time from the top. Nothing else goes on the list. Anything you do not finish rolls to the front of tomorrow’s six.

That is the entire method. It is roughly a hundred years old, it needs an index card, and most of what makes it useful is the part people skip: choosing before you are tired, and choosing before you are in front of the work.

What the Ivy Lee method is

It is a shortlist drawn from your list, not a replacement for it. You still need somewhere to keep the forty things you owe, which is what a master to-do list is for. The six are what you pull out of that pile for one specific day, which means the method is really a prioritizing ritual wearing the costume of a to-do list.

Two things it is not. It is not time blocking: there are no clock times, no calendar, no estimate of how long anything takes. And it is not the eat the frog rule, which picks a single most important task and says nothing about the rest of the day. Ivy Lee gives you the whole shape of the day in one ranked column, which is a different promise. If the ranking step is the part you find hard, how to prioritize tasks covers that on its own.

The strict ordering is what makes it more than a short list. Six items with no order is still six open decisions. Six items in a fixed order is one decision made last night and five that are already answered.

How to do the Ivy Lee method

You can run this with paper. Nothing here needs an app.

1. Empty your head first. Before you choose anything, get every open loop out of your head and onto a page, unsorted. That is a brain dump, and it is what keeps you from picking your six out of whatever happens to be top of mind at 5pm.
2. Choose six. From that page, pull the six things that would matter most tomorrow. Fewer than six is allowed and often better. More than six is not, because the cap is the mechanism.
3. Rank them one to six. Order by importance, not by how quick or how loud they are. This is the step that takes real thought, and it is the one that pays for itself in the morning.
4. Name the first physical action for number one. The original method does not include this and it should. “Finish the proposal” is a project. “Open the doc and write the three section headings” is a task you can begin without deciding anything else.
5. Tomorrow, start at number one and stay there. Work it until it is done, then go to number two. Do not skim the list for something easier, because the skim is the decision you already paid to avoid.
6. At the end of the day, write the next six. Unfinished items go to the top of the new card unless they have stopped mattering, in which case let them go without ceremony.

That last step is the one that turns it from a trick into a practice. The card is written at the end of the day, every day, which is also when you have the clearest picture of what happened.

Where the Ivy Lee method comes from

The story goes like this. Around 1918, the consultant Ivy Lee met Charles M. Schwab, then president of Bethlehem Steel, and offered him a productivity idea. Lee spent about fifteen minutes with each executive explaining the six-task card and asked for no payment up front, saying Schwab should send whatever he thought it was worth after three months. Three months later Schwab supposedly mailed him a check for $25,000, which is somewhere north of half a million dollars today.

The parts of that which hold up: Ivy Ledbetter Lee was real, born in 1877, and became one of the founding figures of American public relations (Wikipedia). His professional relationship with Bethlehem Steel is documented in local historical accounts of the company (Lehigh Valley Press).

The parts that do not: no contemporary record of the meeting, the fee, or the wording appears in the accessible historical material. The dramatic version circulates mostly through modern retellings, the most widely read of which is James Clear’s, and the details drift between versions. The dollar figure, the number of minutes, and the exact year all vary depending on who is telling it. Treat it as a business fable with a real man’s name attached, in the same family as the Mark Twain frog quote that no one can find in Twain.

None of that decides whether the method works. It is worth knowing because productivity advice tends to arrive wrapped in a confident origin story, and the story is usually the least verifiable part of the package.

Why the Ivy Lee method works

Four separate things are happening in that index card, and three of them have real research behind them.

Deciding the night before is a plan, not a wish. The strongest lever on whether an intention becomes an action is an implementation intention, a plain plan that fixes what you will do and when. Across roughly 94 independent tests, they produced a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, with an average effect size of d = .65 (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). A ranked card written the night before is a crude version of this: item one is what you do, and “as soon as I sit down” is when.

Writing tomorrow down helps you put today down. An unfinished goal keeps a low hum going in the background. When people were left with an unmet goal, it intruded on later tasks that needed focus, and the intrusion faded once they made a concrete plan for it, before doing any of the work (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011). The sleep version is more direct: in a polysomnography study, people who spent five minutes writing a to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about what they had already finished, and the more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep (Scullin et al., 2018). Writing the card at the end of the day is not incidental to the method. It is doing a second job.

One at a time protects the work. The “do not move on until it is finished” rule is the part that looks rigid and is doing the most. Switching tasks leaves part of your attention stuck on the last one, which measurably degrades performance on the new one, an effect called attention residue (Leroy, 2009). The American Psychological Association’s summary of the switching research puts the cost of repeated switching at as much as 40 percent of productive time, worst when the tasks are complex (APA). A ranked list with a stay-put rule is a cheap way to buy single-tasking without any new software.

A cap forces the ranking. This is the part with no research behind it, and it is worth saying plainly. Six is arbitrary. There is no study establishing six as the correct number of daily tasks, and the classic working-memory numbers people reach for to justify it, seven plus or minus two or the more conservative modern estimate of about four chunks, are about holding items in mind, not about how many things fit in a workday. What the cap does is force a real choice. Any number small enough to hurt would work. CHADD’s own day-planner guidance lands nearby, suggesting a daily list of five to eight items so that finishing it stays realistic (CHADD).

Where the Ivy Lee method falls apart

Four honest failure modes, because the method is usually sold without any.

Six tasks is not six hours. The method caps the count and says nothing about duration, which is where most people break it on day one. We reliably underestimate how long our own work will take, a bias documented since Buehler, Griffin and Ross found people’s completion-time predictions were consistently too optimistic even for tasks they had done before (Buehler et al., 1994). Six items chosen without a rough time estimate is just a longer list in a shorter costume. If you want the durations too, that is closer to how to plan your day.

Strict order assumes you own your calendar. The rule works for someone with an open day and no inbound. It does not survive a support queue, a ward round, three meetings, or a toddler. Most people can protect one or two ordered blocks, not a whole ranked day, and the method is more useful adapted to that than abandoned for it.

“Do not move on until it is finished” collides with blocked work. Plenty of number-one tasks stall waiting on somebody else’s reply. The practical amendment is that a task counts as done for the day when you have pushed it as far as you can and written down what it is waiting on. Otherwise the rule turns into a reason to sit still.

The statistics attached to it are mostly unsourced. You will see confident claims that some large percentage of to-do list items are never completed, usually traced back to a company blog post rather than a study. There is no peer-reviewed figure establishing a general completion rate for to-do lists, so treat any specific number you see next to this method as marketing, including the $25,000.

The Ivy Lee method and ADHD

For an ADHD or executive-function brain, this method has one very good part and one part that tends to backfire.

The good part is the cap and the ranking. Prioritizing is not automatic when your working memory is already busy holding the tasks themselves, which is the core of Russell Barkley’s account of ADHD as a disorder of behavioral inhibition with downstream costs to working memory and self-directed action (Barkley, 1997). Moving the ranking out of your head and onto a card is exactly the kind of external scaffold that helps, and CHADD’s advice runs the same direction: keep the daily list short, and mark the top three (CHADD).

The part that backfires is “do not move on until it is finished.” A long, unrewarding number one with no obvious first move is a good recipe for a whole morning spent frozen in front of it, which is task paralysis, not laziness. The rigid version also has no exit: if you cannot start item one, the method says you are not allowed to do items two through six either.

Three adaptations that keep the useful parts:

• Write three, not six. CHADD’s guidance to pick a top three is a better starting cap when overwhelm is the failure mode (CHADD).
• Never write a vague number one. Break the top item down until the first physical action is something you could do in ten minutes without deciding anything.
• Allow one swap. If item one is genuinely stuck, move to item two and come back, rather than losing the day defending a rule from 1918.

If most days feel like this, and it comes with real anxiety or low mood, that is worth raising with a doctor or therapist. A planning method is not a treatment. For the wider picture, see executive dysfunction and ADHD.

How Whit fits the Ivy Lee method

The loop the method needs is empty your head, pick a few, put them in order, and do them one at a time. That is the loop Whit runs. Whit is a calm brain dump and daily planner for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The evening step has to cost almost nothing or it does not survive the week. In Whit you get everything out by text or voice, and it lands in a Calm Inbox rather than a wall of red overdue badges, so the pile you choose your six from is the honest one instead of the guilty one. Then you move a small number of items onto the Visual Day, a gentle timeline from sunrise to night, which adds the thing the index card never had: a rough sense of whether your six fit in a day. Unfinished items are still there tomorrow, without turning red about it. See everything Whit does, or read how a brain dump becomes a daily plan.

What you write stays yours. Whit syncs only through your own iCloud, with no accounts, no logins, and no analytics in the app.

Common questions about the Ivy Lee method

What is the Ivy Lee method?

It is a daily planning routine in which you write down your six most important tasks at the end of each workday, rank them by importance, and work them in order the next day without skipping ahead. Anything unfinished moves to the top of the next day’s list of six.

Why six tasks and not some other number?

There is no research behind the number six specifically. The cap matters more than its exact value, because a limit small enough to be uncomfortable is what forces you to rank instead of collect. Many people find three or four works better, and CHADD suggests five to eight for a realistic daily list.

Is the $25,000 Ivy Lee story true?

Partly. Ivy Lee was a real public relations pioneer who did work with Bethlehem Steel, but the famous consultation with Charles Schwab and the check for $25,000 cannot be traced to any contemporary record. The details change between retellings, so treat it as a business fable rather than documented history.

What do I do with the tasks I do not finish?

Move them to the top of tomorrow’s six, since importance rarely expires overnight. If an item rolls over three or four days running, that is information rather than failure: it is usually too vague, too large, or not important enough, and it needs to be broken down or dropped.

How is the Ivy Lee method different from eat the frog?

Eat the frog picks one most important task and says do it first, leaving the rest of the day unplanned. The Ivy Lee method ranks six tasks and gives the whole day a fixed order. In practice your Ivy Lee number one is your frog, so the two methods stack rather than compete.

Related reading

• The capture step in full: what a brain dump is and how to do one.
• If ranking is the hard part: how to prioritize tasks.
• The one-task version of this idea: eat the frog.
• If you keep freezing in front of item one: task paralysis.
• The whole-day version with durations attached: how to plan your day.

Where to start

Tonight, before you close the laptop, write down everything your head is still carrying. Pick three things from it, not six, and put them in order. Then rewrite number one until the first step is something you could do in ten minutes. That is the whole method at its smallest, and it is the version most likely to still be running in a week.

If you want a calm place to put it all down and choose tomorrow’s short list, Whit is a one-time purchase for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There is a 7-day free trial, then $99 once with no subscription. See the details.