The Ivy Lee Method: A 100-Year-Old Productivity Trick That Still Outperforms Most Modern Systems

In 1918, Charles Schwab — then president of Bethlehem Steel, one of the largest companies in the world — hired a productivity consultant named Ivy Lee. Schwab told Lee he would pay whatever he asked if Lee could show him a way to get more things done.

Lee asked for 15 minutes with each of Schwab’s executives. He would share his method, and Schwab could pay whatever he thought it was worth after three months of trying it.

Three months later, Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000 — the equivalent of roughly $400,000 today.

The method Lee taught took less than 15 minutes to explain. It has not changed since.

The Ivy Lee Method

The method has six steps:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. No more than six.

2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.

3. When you arrive at work the next day, concentrate only on the first task. Work until it is finished before moving to the second.

4. Approach the rest of your 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 process every working day.

That is it. Five steps, unchanged since 1918, that helped one of the world’s largest industrial companies operate more effectively at the executive level.

Why Something This Simple Works

The Ivy Lee Method solves three problems that undermine most productivity systems — and it solves all three at once.

It forces prioritization

The limit of six is not arbitrary. It is a constraint that forces a decision: of everything you could do tomorrow, what actually matters most?

Most people never make this decision explicitly. They write long task lists, start with whatever feels easiest or most urgent, and hope the important things surface naturally. They usually do not.

The Ivy Lee Method demands that you make the prioritization decision the night before — in a calm, clear state — rather than at the beginning of the day when you are reactive and already being pulled in multiple directions.

Six tasks forces real choices. You cannot list everything and pretend it all matters equally. Something has to be first. Something has to be sixth. The act of ranking is itself a form of clarity.

It creates single-task focus

The instruction to “concentrate only on the first task until it is finished before moving to the second” is a direct counter to the modern habit of constant task-switching.

Research on multitasking consistently shows that it is largely illusory — what people call multitasking is actually rapid task-switching, and every switch carries a cognitive cost. Attention residue accumulates. Quality drops. Speed drops too, despite the feeling of getting more done.

Working on one thing until it is complete is more efficient, produces better output, and builds the focused attention that increasingly rare cognitive work requires.

It is also psychologically satisfying in a way that multitasking is not. Finishing something feels different from making partial progress on several things simultaneously. The Ivy Lee Method structures your day around completion rather than activity.

It prevents decision fatigue from consuming the day

One of the most insidious ways productivity time gets wasted is in deciding what to do next. Every transition between tasks — every moment where you look at your list and think “now what?” — consumes cognitive resources that could go toward actually doing things.

The Ivy Lee Method eliminates these micro-decisions. You know exactly what to do when you sit down. You know what to do when the first task is done. There is no “now what?” — there is just the list, worked in order.

This is the same principle behind planning your wardrobe in advance, meal prepping, and any other system that moves decisions out of the moment and into a calm planning period. Decisions made in advance are cheaper and often better than decisions made under the pressure of the immediate.

The Psychology of Working the List in Order

The insistence on working through the list in strict priority order — not skipping to an easier task when the first one feels hard — is where most people stumble, and where most of the method’s value lives.

The temptation is always to defer the hard first task. It is sitting there at the top of the list, demanding real effort, while items two through six look comparatively manageable. Jumping to a medium task first seems harmless — you are still working, still being productive.

But the Ivy Lee Method’s logic is clear: if the first task is truly the most important thing you need to do tomorrow, then any time spent on anything else before it is a deprioritization of your highest-value work. You are choosing to spend your best cognitive hours — your morning brain, before decision fatigue and accumulated interruptions — on things you ranked as less important.

Over the course of a year, the compounding effect of consistently doing your most important work first versus doing it last (or not at all) is enormous.

Working the list in order is also a form of commitment device. You are not just saying “this is important.” You are saying “I will do this before anything else.” The commitment made the night before holds you accountable to the prioritization judgment your clearer evening mind made.

Handling Interruptions and New Tasks

The most common practical question about the Ivy Lee Method: what do you do when urgent new tasks arrive during the day?

Lee’s answer, implicitly, is that very few things that arrive during the day are more important than what you decided was most important the night before. Most “urgent” interruptions are urgent to someone else, not necessarily important to your actual work.

A practical approach:

For genuinely urgent items: If something truly cannot wait and genuinely outranks your current task, handle it and return to your list. This should be rare.

For everything else: Write it down. Add it to tomorrow’s list if it belongs there, or to a separate capture list if it needs to be considered later. Do not let it pull you off your current task.

At the end of the day: When you build tomorrow’s list, incorporate anything from the day that deserves to be there. Some of today’s interruptions will make it onto tomorrow’s six. Most will not.

The discipline is not in never handling interruptions — it is in not letting interruptions become the organizing principle of your day.

The Ivy Lee Method Versus Other Systems

Compared to the other productivity systems covered in this blog, the Ivy Lee Method is notable for what it does not include.

It has no capture system, no project tracking, no weekly review, no time blocking. It is purely a daily prioritization and execution method. This is both its limitation and its strength.

Compared to GTD: GTD is comprehensive — it handles everything from task capture to project management to weekly review. The Ivy Lee Method handles only one thing: deciding what to do tomorrow and doing it in the right order. For people who find GTD’s overhead too heavy, Ivy Lee is a viable alternative for the execution layer.

Compared to the 1-3-5 Rule: Both methods constrain daily task lists and force prioritization. The 1-3-5 Rule adds a layer of categorization (big/medium/small) that helps with load estimation. Ivy Lee is simpler but slightly less structured about matching task size to daily capacity.

Compared to Eat the Frog: Eat the Frog and Ivy Lee are deeply compatible — Eat the Frog says do the most important task first, Ivy Lee says list your tasks in priority order and work through them in order. The first item on an Ivy Lee list is always the frog.

Compared to Time Blocking: Time blocking protects specific hours for specific work. Ivy Lee does not prescribe when each task happens, only what order they happen in. The two methods combine well: use time blocking to protect your morning for the Ivy Lee list, and let the list determine what you do with that protected time.

Adapting the Method for Modern Work

A few adaptations worth considering for modern knowledge work:

Adjust the number if needed. Six is the number Lee chose, and it works well. If your tasks tend to be very large, four or five might be more realistic. If your tasks tend to be smaller, six is probably right. Do not exceed six — the constraint is part of the method.

Be realistic about task size. A task that will take four hours should not share a list with a task that takes ten minutes. Both need to be on the list, but understanding the scale of each helps you plan your day more accurately. You may only complete two or three tasks on days when your top items are large.

Use it alongside a capture system. The Ivy Lee Method tells you what to do tomorrow — but it does not tell you how to track everything that is not on tomorrow’s list. A simple inbox or capture list where everything else lives keeps your Ivy Lee list clean while ensuring nothing important gets lost.

Do the list-building at the same time every day. End of day works well — the day’s context is fresh, and you can see clearly what carried over versus what was completed. The ritual of building tomorrow’s list before you close your work day also creates a clean psychological ending to the day.

A Method Worth Trying

The Ivy Lee Method is not sophisticated. It does not require an app, a framework, or any ongoing maintenance beyond five minutes each evening.

What it requires is the discipline to make a real prioritization decision each day and the commitment to work in order of that decision.

That combination — clear priorities, sequential focus, daily repetition — is what made it worth $25,000 in 1918 and what makes it worth trying today.

Combine the Ivy Lee Method with the Quest Planner for weekly context: use the Quest Planner to set your weekly main quest and side quests, then use the Ivy Lee Method to decide which specific tasks from those quests go on tomorrow’s list of six.