The Ivy Lee Method: a 1918 rule for getting six things done

A 100-year-old habit that beats most modern productivity systems on simplicity alone. Six tasks, ranked, done in order, no skipping.

The Ivy Lee Method is a daily prioritization habit: at the end of each workday, write down the six most important things to do tomorrow, rank them in order of true priority, and the next day work through them one at a time, never starting the second task until the first is finished. Anything left over rolls onto the top of the next day’s list.

That is the entire method. It has survived a century because it is almost impossible to overcomplicate.

Where it came from

The method is credited to Ivy Lee, an American public relations pioneer, around 1918. As the story goes, Lee offered the routine to Charles Schwab, then running Bethlehem Steel, and asked Schwab to pay whatever he felt it was worth after trying it. Schwab is said to have mailed a check for 25,000 dollars a few weeks later. Treat the dollar figure as business lore rather than a verified fact, but the method itself has been repeated by productivity writers ever since.

What makes it interesting is the deliberate friction. Most planning systems try to capture everything. This one caps you at six and forces a single, ranked order. The limit is the feature.

How to actually do it

1. At the end of the day, write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow. Not eight, not a backlog dump. Six.
2. Rank them in honest order of importance. If two feel equal, pick the one with the worse consequence for being skipped.
3. Tomorrow, start at the top. Work only on task one until it is done or genuinely blocked.
4. Then move to task two, and so on. No jumping ahead because something else feels easier or more urgent in the moment.
5. At day’s end, move any unfinished tasks to the top of a fresh list of six and repeat.

A concrete example. A founder’s list might read: (1) finish the investor update, (2) review the contract from legal, (3) one-on-one with the new hire, (4) fix the broken signup email, (5) draft the Q3 hiring plan, (6) clear the support backlog. She starts the investor update at 9am and does not touch the contract until the update is sent, even though the support backlog keeps nagging at her. By forcing the update first, the constraint protects the work that is easiest to postpone.

When it works and when it does not

It works best when your days are mostly yours to direct: independent contributors, founders, writers, anyone whose problem is choosing among many possible things rather than reacting all day.

It strains in two situations. The first is reactive work. If you run a support desk or take calls all day, a fixed ranked list collides with constant interruption. The second is the time problem. The Ivy Lee Method tells you what to do and in what order, but it says nothing about when, or whether six tasks even fit in the hours you have. A list of six can quietly hide forty hours of work.

That is where ranked tasks meet a calendar. Once you know the order, the next question is how the day fits together, which is the job of time blocking and a realistic plan for the hours you actually have. If you want the broader habit, our guide on how to plan your day covers fitting priorities into real hours.

Where ClaroCal fits. ClaroCal is a modern take on this: it turns that short ranked list into a timed, time-blocked plan on your Google Calendar and carries the unfinished tasks forward to the next day, so the method handles the what and the order while the schedule handles the when. You can see the plans on the pricing page.

The short version

Cap tomorrow at six tasks. Rank them. Do them in order. Carry the rest forward. The discipline is not in the list, it is in refusing to start task two before task one is done. Try it for a week before deciding whether the constraint helps, because it usually does more than a more elaborate system would.

Last reviewed June 2026.