The Ivy Lee Method: A 100-Year-Old Prioritization Rule That Still Works

In 1918, a consultant named Ivy Lee walked into the offices of Bethlehem Steel and made Charles Schwab — one of the richest men in America at the time — a simple offer: give me 15 minutes with each of your executives, let them try my method for three months, and pay me whatever you think it was worth.

Three months later, Schwab handed Lee a check for $25,000. Roughly $500,000 in today’s money.

The method Lee had shared? Six steps. Zero apps. Completely free.

What is the Ivy Lee Method?

The Ivy Lee Method is a nightly planning routine:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks you need to accomplish tomorrow.
2. Rank them in order of true importance — not urgency, not ease. Importance.
3. The next morning, start with task one. Don’t move to task two until task one is complete (or as complete as it can be).
4. Work through the list in order. Whatever doesn’t get done moves to tomorrow’s list.
5. Repeat every evening.

That’s it. No system, no app, no acronym. Just a list of six things, ranked honestly, done in order.

Why it worked in 1918 — and still works now

The genius of the Ivy Lee Method isn’t the number six. It’s the discipline it forces around two things most productivity systems underinvest in: ranking and sequencing.

Most task lists are unordered. You capture everything — emails to write, projects to advance, things to research — and then face the same cognitive problem every morning: which one first? That decision takes mental energy, and it usually defaults toward what’s comfortable rather than what matters.

The Ivy Lee Method moves that decision to the night before, when you’re wrapping up and have perspective on what actually needs to happen tomorrow. By the time you sit down to work, the decision is already made. You just execute.

This is the same insight behind the MIT method — that naming your highest-priority work before the day starts dramatically increases the odds you’ll actually do it. The Ivy Lee Method extends that logic across six tasks and anchors the decision in a nightly habit rather than a morning scramble.

It also solves a subtler problem: the illusion of productivity. When your list has 40 items and no order, it’s easy to spend a day clearing the small, fast tasks and feel accomplished — while the things that actually matter sit untouched. The Ivy Lee Method makes that trade-off visible. If you get to task four and realize it’s lower-priority than something you didn’t put on the list, that tells you something about how you ranked things.

The “only six” constraint isn’t arbitrary

Limiting yourself to six forces a real prioritization decision that an unlimited list never does.

When you can add anything to a list, you add everything. When you can only put six things on tomorrow’s list, you have to ask harder questions: Is this actually important, or does it just feel urgent? Does this need to happen tomorrow, or am I adding it because it’s been sitting there? What would I be genuinely disappointed not to have moved forward by end of day?

That constraint is where the value lives. It’s easy to prioritize when you have six things. It’s genuinely hard — and genuinely important — when you have forty.

The number six itself may not be magic, but the discipline of picking a small, ranked set and committing to it is. Some versions of the method use three tasks, some use five. What matters is that the list is short enough to force real choices.

The common failure mode

The Ivy Lee Method breaks down when people treat it as a daily tasks list rather than a prioritized daily plan.

The difference: a daily tasks list is everything you could do tomorrow. A prioritized daily plan is what you’re committing to do, in the order you’ve decided matters most.

If you’re writing down eight things and calling them “the six most important,” you’ve already lost the thread. If you’re putting task one as “respond to emails” because it’s low-effort and feels good to start there, you’ve undermined the whole system.

The method requires honesty about what actually matters — not what’s comfortable, not what will look productive in a standup, but what would represent real progress if you got nothing else done.

How to pair it with your task app

The Ivy Lee Method was designed for pen and paper. But it works just as well with a task manager — better, even, if your app supports prioritization.

The workflow:

1. At the end of your workday, open your task list.
2. Look at everything on your plate — all the open tasks, the things you promised yourself, the projects that have been sitting.
3. Ask: if I could only do six things tomorrow, what would they be?
4. Rank those six by true importance. Drag them to the top, mark them high priority, or create a “tomorrow” tag — whatever makes them visible and ordered.
5. Close the app. You’re done planning for today.
6. Tomorrow morning, open your app, look at your ranked list, and start with number one.

The key is that the ranking happens the night before, not in the morning when you’re already in reactive mode. Time blocking your morning around your top items — rather than checking email first — is what turns the ranked list into completed work.

What to do with the tasks that don’t make the list

Most days, you’ll have more than six things that need attention. The Ivy Lee Method doesn’t pretend otherwise — it just says those things aren’t today’s priorities.

Tasks that don’t make the daily six go back into your full task list to be reconsidered tomorrow. If something keeps getting bumped from the daily list day after day, that’s useful signal: either it’s less important than you thought, or there’s something about the task that’s creating resistance worth examining.

The weekly planning habit is a natural companion to the daily Ivy Lee routine. Where the weekly review helps you set direction and surface what needs to move in the coming week, the nightly Ivy Lee session translates that direction into concrete daily priorities.

Try it tonight

The best way to understand why Schwab paid $25,000 for this advice is to try it for a week.

Tonight, before you close your laptop, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow. Rank them honestly — not by how easy they are, but by how much they actually matter. Then tomorrow morning, start with number one and don’t move on until it’s done.

It will feel too simple. That’s the point.

The hard work isn’t the method. The hard work is being honest about what matters, writing it down, and holding to that order when something shiny or urgent tries to pull you away. The method just gives you a structure that makes that honesty possible — every single evening, for as long as you use it.