The Ivy Lee method is a daily routine with one rule: write down six tasks tonight, rank them, and do them one at a time tomorrow. You do not start task two until task one is finished. Anything left over rolls to the top of tomorrow’s six. That is the whole system — no app, no categories, no scoring.
Key takeaways
- The Ivy Lee method has six steps and takes about five minutes a day: list six tasks the night before, rank them by importance, work them in order, finish one before starting the next, and carry the rest forward.
- The famous story — Charles Schwab paying consultant Ivy Lee $25,000 for the idea at Bethlehem Steel in 1918 — is a business anecdote traced to Scott Cutlip’s history of public relations, and is often mis-dated to 1905.
- Writing the list the night before turns a vague intention into a written when-and-what plan, which is the single best-evidenced productivity technique there is (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
- Ranking by importance rather than by how a task feels matters because unpleasant tasks are the ones most reliably delayed, whatever their priority (Steel, 2007).
- The method suits work you control and fits reactive roles badly, because a strict do-not-switch rule breaks the moment someone else sets your priorities.
What the Ivy Lee method is
The Ivy Lee method is a six-step daily routine for deciding what to work on and in what order. It was described by the American consultant Ivy Lee about a century ago, and it has survived because there is almost nothing in it to get wrong.
Here it is in full:
- At the end of the workday, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow. No more than six.
- Put them in order of real importance.
- Tomorrow, start with the first one. Work only on that.
- Finish it before you touch number two.
- Work down the list the same way. Whatever you don’t finish moves to tomorrow’s list.
- Do this every working day.
That’s it. The two rules doing the real work are the cap of six and the refusal to move on early.
The $25,000 story — and what’s actually true about it
Almost every article about this method opens with the same anecdote, and it deserves a caveat. The story goes that Ivy Lee offered the routine to Charles Schwab, then running Bethlehem Steel, with no fee agreed — just “send me a cheque for whatever you think it’s worth.” Three months later Schwab supposedly sent $25,000, which is well over $400,000 in today’s money.
The account is usually traced to The Unseen Power: Public Relations: A History by Scott Cutlip, which is where the 1918 date comes from; retellings that say 1905 appear to be wrong. But it isn’t verified. It’s a decades-old anecdote passed between books, not a documented transaction, and nobody retelling it seems to have seen the cheque.
Treat it as folklore that stuck around because the method is good — not as evidence that it works.
Why something this simple works
The method does three specific jobs, and each one has better support than the story does.
It makes the decision the night before. A written list of six ranked tasks is a plan that says what you’ll do and when. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed 94 separate tests of exactly this kind of written if-then planning and found a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually followed through (d = 0.65). In one of those studies, on exercise, 91% of people who wrote a specific plan did the thing, against 35% who only got encouragement. Deciding in advance is doing most of the work.
It forces you to rank by importance, not by feel. Left alone, we don’t pick the most valuable task — we pick the least unpleasant one. Piers Steel’s review of 216 studies found that how aversive a task feels is one of the most reliable predictors of whether it gets delayed (r = .40), regardless of how important it is. Ranking on paper, the night before, separates the decision from the flinch.
It caps how much you can carry. Six is arbitrary — Lee could have said five. Having a number at all is not. A list of thirty is a list of nothing, and a list you can’t finish is a fresh failure every evening.
The one rule people quietly drop. “Finish before you move on” is the rule that makes this different from an ordinary to-do list, and it’s the first one to go. If you routinely have three of the six open at once, you’re running a to-do list with a cap — which is fine, but don’t expect the Ivy Lee result from it.
How to run it tonight
Give this five minutes at the end of today and you can run it tomorrow.
- Set a five-minute alarm for the end of your workday. The method depends on the list existing before you stop, so make it the last thing you do.
- Write six tasks on paper. Paper, not an app — the point is that the list can’t grow. Each one should be small enough to actually finish in a day.
- Rank them by consequence, not by dread. Ask which one, if done by tonight, would matter most a week from now. That’s number one.
- Tomorrow, start on number one before you open email. Email hands your ranking to whoever wrote to you overnight.
- At the end of tomorrow, rewrite the list. Unfinished items go to the top of the new six. If something rolls over three days running, it’s too big or you don’t intend to do it — split it or drop it.
How it compares to other methods
| Method | What it decides | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| Ivy Lee | The order of your day, fixed the night before | You know roughly what needs doing and keep drifting between tasks |
| Eat That Frog | Only the first task — do the worst one first | One specific job is being avoided and it’s poisoning the day |
| The Eisenhower matrix | What to drop, by sorting urgent against important | You’re overloaded and need to cut, not sequence |
| Getting Things Done | Where everything lives, across every project | The problem is that things get lost, not that you can’t choose |
These aren’t rivals. A common pairing is Ivy Lee for the day’s order with The ONE Thing‘s question — what’s the one task that makes the rest easier? — used to pick number one.
Common mistakes
- Writing eight tasks. The cap is the method. Eight is a to-do list wearing its hat.
- Listing projects instead of tasks. “Website” isn’t a task. “Write the homepage copy” is.
- Making the list in the morning. You then spend your freshest half hour deciding rather than doing.
- Ranking by what’s easiest to start. That’s the flinch choosing for you — see how to overcome procrastination.
- Rebuilding it in an app. An hour configuring a system is an hour not spent on task one — a trap with a name and a cost.
When it won’t work
The Ivy Lee method assumes you own your day, and plenty of jobs don’t work that way. If you’re in support, operations, clinical work, or anything on-call, other people set your order for you, and a strict finish-before-you-switch rule collapses by mid-morning.
Two other limits. Long projects don’t fit in a day, so they need splitting into day-sized pieces before they can go on the list at all. And on unpredictable weeks the night-before list is stale by 10am — there, two or three non-negotiables survive better than six.
If your problem is that you can’t start rather than that you can’t choose, this isn’t your method. The two-minute rule is.
The evidence behind it
The method itself has never been tested in a controlled study — no one has run a trial of six tasks against seven. What has been tested are the two mechanisms it relies on.
| Source | What it is | What it supports |
|---|---|---|
| Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) | Meta-analysis · 94 independent tests | Writing the plan in advance: d = 0.65 on goal attainment |
| Milne, Orbell & Sheeran (2002), Br. J. Health Psychol. | Randomised experiment · exercise participation | 91% followed through with a written plan, vs 35% given encouragement alone |
| Steel (2007), Psychological Bulletin | Meta-analysis · 216 studies | Ranking by importance rather than feel: task aversiveness predicts delay, r = .40 |
| Cutlip (1994), The Unseen Power | History of public relations | The 1918 Schwab anecdote’s provenance — the story’s origin, not proof it worked |
Frequently asked questions
Why six tasks and not five or ten?
There is no research behind the number six — Ivy Lee picked it, and nobody has tested it against other numbers. What matters is having a cap at all, small enough to finish on a normal day. If six consistently leaves three untouched, use four. The rule not to loosen is finishing each task before starting the next; that is what separates this from an ordinary list.
What do I do about meetings and email?
They aren’t tasks, so they don’t go on the list — they’re the fixed furniture your six fit around. Check tomorrow’s calendar first and be honest about how many hours are free; a day with four hours of meetings does not hold six tasks. If email is genuinely part of your job, make one of the six a block, such as “clear the client inbox before 11”.
What if something urgent comes in?
Deal with it, then go back to where you were. The method isn’t a promise that nothing will interrupt you; it’s a default order to return to afterwards. What it protects you from is softer drift — switching because the current task got uncomfortable. If real emergencies arrive most days, the method is a poor fit for your role, not a discipline you’re failing at.
Should I use an app for this?
Paper is better here, and not for romantic reasons: a paper list cannot grow past six, while every app invites a seventh item, a tag and a sub-task. The friction is the feature. If you must use software, use the plainest thing you have — a note, not a project manager.
Is the Ivy Lee method the same as eating the frog?
They overlap but decide different things. Eat That Frog concerns one task only: do the hardest or most avoided thing first. The Ivy Lee method sequences the whole day and says nothing about which task is the unpleasant one. Many people combine them — rank the six by importance, and where two are close, put the one you’re dreading higher.
How long before it starts working?
You’ll feel it on day one, because the hardest part of a morning is deciding and you’ve already done it. Whether it lasts is a different question: most people drop it within a fortnight by skipping the evening list, which quietly turns tomorrow into an ordinary day. Protect the five minutes at the end of the day, not the discipline during it.
Related reading on The Growth Reads
The books behind this
- Eat That Frog! summary & review — the case for putting the worst task first
- The ONE Thing summary & review — how to choose task number one
- Getting Things Done summary & review — the full capture system, if a six-line list isn’t enough
- Essentialism summary & review — deciding what shouldn’t be on the list at all
Related articles
- How to overcome procrastination: the 6-step system — for when the problem is starting, not ordering
- The two-minute rule — shrinking the first move
- The shiny object tax — why rebuilding this in an app defeats it
Go deeper
How this article was researched
The Growth Reads editorial team works from primary sources. The three research figures above were checked against the original papers or their published abstracts and are quoted with sample size and effect size. The $25,000 anecdote is reported as an anecdote with its provenance, because that is all it is — we could not verify the transaction, and would rather say so than repeat it as history.
We have found no controlled study of the Ivy Lee method itself. Where this article says something works, it is either citing evidence for the underlying mechanism or telling you plainly that it is practical experience.
How we work: every article on The Growth Reads is built from the books in our library plus the research they rest on, and is reviewed and date-stamped when the evidence changes. Read our full methodology.
Sources
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
- Milne, S., Orbell, S., & Sheeran, P. (2002). Combining motivational and volitional interventions to promote exercise participation: Protection motivation theory and implementation intentions. British Journal of Health Psychology, 7(2), 163–184. doi:10.1348/135910702169420
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Cutlip, S. M. (1994). The Unseen Power: Public Relations: A History. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The Schwab–Lee account appears at pp. 118–119 and is the usual source for the 1918 date.