The Ivy Lee Method: The 6-Task Daily Prioritization System

By Camellia · Updated Oct 12, 2026

The Ivy Lee method is a daily planning routine with one rule set: each evening, write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow, rank them by importance, and the next day work through them in order, one at a time. Whatever isn't finished moves to tomorrow's new list of six. It's a cap, a ranking and a single-focus habit, all on one sheet of paper.

Key Facts

• The method is named after Ivy Lee, a public relations pioneer. In the story as James Clear tells it, Lee met Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, in 1918 and offered a way to help his executives get more done.
• The routine has five steps: write the six most important tasks for tomorrow, rank them, start the next day with task one, work down the list, and move unfinished items to the next day's list.
• In that same telling, Lee asked for no fee up front, and Schwab sent a check for $25,000 after three months. The payment is a legend as Fortune frames it, not a documented fact.
• Fortune also notes that self-help writers rebranded the routine as the "Ivy Lee method" in the 1960s, which is part of why the origin story is hard to pin down.
• The method's strength is its constraints: a hard cap of six, a forced ranking, and no switching until the current task is done.

Where the Ivy Lee Method Comes From

Ivy Lee is best remembered as a pioneer of corporate public relations. The productivity routine attached to his name arrives through a story that's been retold for decades.

Here's the story as it's usually told. In 1918, Charles Schwab, then president of Bethlehem Steel, asked Lee to show him a way to get more things done. Lee offered to spend fifteen minutes with each of Schwab's executives. He wouldn't charge anything unless it worked, and after three months Schwab could pay whatever he thought the advice was worth. The advice itself was the six-task list. Per James Clear's account, Schwab later wrote Lee a check for $25,000.

Treat that as a good story, not a verified case study. Fortune calls it the legend behind the method and says the "Ivy Lee method" label was applied by self-help writers in the 1960s. The payment, the fifteen minutes and the exact results aren't things you should quote as established. What you can say is that the routine is simple, has been passed along for a very long time, and works because of how it's built, not because of who may have first used it.

It's also worth knowing that Lee's later career was controversial. The same Fortune piece covers his advisory work for I.G. Farben, a German chemical conglomerate, which began in the late 1920s. The method stands on its own merits, and the history is a reason to describe the origin story carefully rather than as a tidy parable.

The Five Steps

The version most people use follows the steps James Clear lists:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow. No more than six.
2. Rank those six tasks by true importance.
3. Tomorrow morning, concentrate only on the first task. Work until it's finished before moving to the second.
4. Work through the rest of the list in order. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a fresh list of six for the next day.
5. Repeat this every working day.

That's the entire system. No app, no tagging, no weekly review required.

Why a Cap of Six Works

Most to-do lists fail in a boring way. They grow. A list with 25 items makes every item feel equally urgent, so people reach for whatever is easiest or loudest. The six-task cap forces a decision the night before, when you're not in the middle of an interruption.

Three design choices do the heavy lifting:

• The cap. You can't add a seventh task without cutting one. That's a built-in trade-off.
• The ranking. Writing "1" next to a task means deciding what matters most before the day starts, not discovering at 4 p.m. that the big one never got touched.
• The single focus. Starting with task one and finishing it before moving on removes the daily question "what should I do right now?"

Our guide to why personal productivity fails makes a related point: the problem is rarely a missing tool. It's usually a missing decision about what comes first.

Ivy Lee Method vs 1-3-5, Eisenhower, GTD and Eat the Frog

These systems overlap, but they answer different questions. The Ivy Lee method answers "what are my top priorities tomorrow, in what order?"

A useful way to see it: Eisenhower sorts, GTD stores, and Ivy Lee commits. Many people combine them. You might keep a GTD-style master list, use the Eisenhower matrix once a week to see what's truly important, and then pick tomorrow's six with the Ivy Lee method. If you like the idea of a cap but want a size-based structure, read about Parkinson's law too, since it explains why a task tends to swell to fill the time you give it.

How to Run the Ivy Lee Method: Step by Step

1. Pick a fixed time. Do it in the last ten minutes of the workday, before you shut the laptop. The point is that tomorrow starts with no planning.
2. Dump, then filter. Glance at your calendar, your open commitments and anything promised to someone else. Write candidates on scrap paper first if you need to.
3. Choose six. Not seven. If you have only four meaningful tasks, write four. The cap is a ceiling, not a quota.
4. Define each task so it can be finished. "Work on budget" isn't a task. "Send the revised Q1 budget to finance for review" is.
5. Rank them. Ask: if I could only finish one of these tomorrow, which would it be? That's number one. Repeat down the list.
6. Put the list where you'll see it first. Paper in your pocket, a sticky note on the monitor, or the top of a notes page.
7. Start with task one and don't skip ahead. If you're blocked, write down the blocker and note who you're waiting on. Then move to task two, and make the blocked task the first thing you re-check.
8. Roll over what's left. At the end of the day, carry unfinished tasks into the next list, then re-rank them. A task rolled over three times is a signal to cut it, split it or hand it off.
9. Review once a week. Look at what keeps rolling over. That pattern is more informative than any single day.

Ready-to-Copy Template: Daily Six-Task Sheet

Copy this table into a notes app, a doc or a notebook. Fill it in at the end of each day for tomorrow.

Add these three lines under the table:

The last row matters. Saying no on paper is what keeps the other six honest.

Examples by Business Function

The method works the same way across roles. What changes is what counts as "important." These are illustrations of how a day's list might look, not claims about results.

Notice that every list leads with something other people are waiting for or something that unblocks a decision, which is a good test for a number one. To tie daily work to bigger goals, see setting tiered goals and metrics.

Do's and Don'ts

When the Ivy Lee Method Falls Short

No single routine fits every job. Here are the common places it struggles.

Reactive roles. If your day is mostly incoming requests, such as support, IT or an executive assistant role, a rigid six-task plan gets overridden by lunchtime. Try it with fewer slots, or reserve two slots for planned work and leave the rest for interrupts.

Collaborative work. A task like "get legal's feedback" depends on someone else's schedule. Include only tasks you control, and put the waiting items in the "waiting on" line.

Large, ambiguous projects. A six-item list doesn't help you decide what the project is. Use a planning method first, then pull the next concrete actions into the daily six. Getting Things Done is better suited to this.

Perfectionism about the ranking. Spending twenty minutes agonizing over whether task three is more important than task four defeats the purpose. Rank quickly. The top one or two matter most.

For more on what derails daily plans, see the productivity traps.

Common Mistakes

Writing tasks that aren't tasks. "Marketing" or "Inbox" can't be finished. If you can't tell when it's done, rewrite it.

Ranking by urgency alone. The loudest request isn't always the most important. If everything on your list is urgent, you're probably in firefighting mode and need to step back and sort with the Eisenhower matrix.

Quietly abandoning the order. The method's single-focus rule is where much of the value sits. Hopping between tasks one and two brings back the context-switching the system is meant to remove.

Treating rollover as failure. Unfinished tasks moving to tomorrow is part of the design. What matters is noticing which ones roll again and again.

Skipping the evening step. Planning in the morning feels equivalent but isn't. The evening version means you start the day already moving.