The Ivy Lee Method — Six Things, In Order, No Exceptions

Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. We’ve covered the timer, the box, and the brain dump. This week’s tool asks you to do almost nothing — just pick six things and do them in order.

In 1918, a productivity consultant named Ivy Lee walked into a meeting with Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel. Schwab told Lee he didn’t need a lecture on what to do. He needed help doing more of it. Lee said he could improve the efficiency of Schwab’s executives in fifteen minutes, and he didn’t ask for a dime up front.

Here’s what he told them to do:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow.
2. Rank those six items in order of true importance.
3. The next morning, start on item one and stay on it until it’s finished before moving to item two.
4. Work through the list in order. If something doesn’t get done, move it to tomorrow’s list of six and start the ranking over.
5. Repeat this every working day.

That’s the whole method. Lee told Schwab to try it for as long as he wanted, then pay whatever he thought the advice was worth. A few weeks later, Schwab sent him a check for $25,000, which in 1918 dollars is somewhere north of half a million today. For fifteen minutes and a list of six.

The Ivy Lee Method doesn’t ask you to organize your entire life. It asks you to make one good decision the night before, so you don’t have to make it forty times tomorrow.

Most of us don’t run out of time. We run out of decision-making energy. Every choice you make throughout the day, what to answer first, what to ignore, whether that email is urgent, draws from the same limited tank. Researchers call this decision fatigue, and it’s why your 4 p.m. choices are so much worse than your 9 a.m. ones. By the time you’re picking what to work on next, you’ve already spent a chunk of your best thinking deciding whether to respond to Karen in accounting.

Ivy Lee’s method front-loads that decision to the night before, when you’re not also trying to do the work. You show up in the morning with the thinking already done. No scanning the inbox to figure out what’s on fire. No renegotiating your priorities every ninety minutes. Item one is sitting there waiting for you, and your only job is to start.

There’s also a sequencing trick built in that most to-do lists skip entirely. A list of twenty things gives your brain twenty places to hide. You can always find something easier than the important thing, and you can tell yourself you’re being productive while you do it. Six ranked items, worked one at a time, close that escape hatch. You can’t “get to it later” when later is item two and item one isn’t done yet.

The unfinished items rolling forward matter more than they look like they do. Psychologists have long studied what’s called the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to keep mentally chewing on tasks we’ve started but not finished. An open loop nags at you in the background whether you’re aware of it or not. Rolling unfinished items to tomorrow’s list, in writing, closes that loop just enough to get it out of your head until it’s actually time to deal with it again.

Where the method gets uncomfortable is the constraint. Six. Not eight, not ten, not “the six most important plus a few quick ones I’ll knock out first.” Six forces you to actually rank, which means admitting that some of what feels urgent isn’t actually important. That’s the whole exercise. If everything makes your list, you haven’t prioritized anything.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a natural list-ranker. My Working Genius profile leans Wonder and Invention, which means my brain wants to explore five directions at once, not pick one and grind through it. But that’s exactly why this one has been useful to have in the toolbox. Some days I don’t need a system. I need a fence.

If you want to try it, don’t overthink the setup. Tonight, before you close your laptop, write down six things you need to get done tomorrow. Rank them. Tomorrow, start with number one and don’t touch number two until it’s done. See how it feels to walk into your day already knowing exactly where to start.

This is part of an ongoing series on productivity tools, systems, and philosophies. If there’s one you’ve heard about but haven’t tried, send it my way at garth@experiencebetterllc.com. I’ll research it and put it to the test so you don’t have to wonder.