TL;DR. The Ivy Lee method is a daily routine from 1918: at the end of each working day, write the six most important things for tomorrow, rank them, then work strictly top down until each is finished. The famous 25,000 dollar story behind it is folklore with no trial and no records, so ignore it. What survives is mechanical. The cap forces prioritising to happen the night before, the strict order removes the decision you would otherwise make six more times, and the roll-over count tells you which items were never really tasks.
Every productivity method that survives a century does so because someone tells a good story about it. The Ivy Lee method has a very good story, and the story is the least reliable part of it.
Here it is, and then here is why the routine is worth running anyway.
The 1918 story, told honestly
Ivy Lee was a public relations consultant. Charles Schwab ran Bethlehem Steel. The version that gets retold goes like this: Lee offered Schwab a method for improving his executives' output, refused to name a price, and told him to send whatever he thought it was worth after three months. Three months later a cheque arrived for 25,000 dollars, which the usual inflation conversions put somewhere north of half a million dollars today.
It is a great anecdote. It is also, as evidence, worth nothing.
There was no trial and no control group. There is no record of what Bethlehem Steel's output did before or after, no way to separate the method from everything else happening in a steel company during the First World War, and no surviving account of the meeting. The story comes to us through decades of retelling in business books, and the details drift between versions: the length of the consultation, who said what, occasionally even the amount.
I am labouring this because the cheque is doing rhetorical work it has not earned. If a routine only sounds good because a rich man once paid a lot for it, that is marketing, not evidence.
The reason to use the Ivy Lee method is that its two constraints happen to solve two specific problems, and you can verify both in a week.
The method
Five steps. It has not changed since it was written down.
- At the end of each working day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. No more than six.
- Rank them in order of true importance.
- Tomorrow, start with the first item. Work on it until it is finished.
- Then move to the second. Same rule.
- At the end of the day, move anything unfinished to the top of a new list of six for the next day. Repeat every working day.
That is it. No categories, no quadrants, no contexts, no energy levels.
What the cap actually does
A list with no ceiling is a capture device, not a plan. Capture is useful, but a captured list lets you write everything down and decide nothing, and the deciding does not disappear. It gets postponed until 9am, when you stare at thirty items with a coffee and pick by feel.
A ceiling moves that decision to the night before, when you are looking back at a finished day rather than forward into an unstarted one. That is a much better moment to judge importance. You know what actually took time today. You are not yet optimistic about tomorrow.
Six is not a magic number and nobody has ever demonstrated that it is. What matters is that the number is small enough to force a cut. The moment a seventh item wants to exist, something on the list has to be defended or dropped, and that small act of defence is the entire prioritisation exercise.
If you want the same constraint with a sizing dimension attached, the 1-3-5 rule caps the day at one big task, three medium and five small, and the 1-3-5 task planner is that version in nine slots. Ivy Lee ignores size and orders by importance instead. Both are ceilings. Pick the one whose failure mode you find less annoying.
What the strict order does
This is the half of the method people drop first, and it is the half that does the work.
Without a fixed order, you make a prioritisation decision every time you finish something. Six tasks means six decisions, each one taken in whatever state the previous task left you in. Tired, mid-afternoon, slightly demoralised, you will reliably pick the easiest remaining item, and the hard one will still be there at 5pm, where it becomes tomorrow's problem.
A ranked list makes one decision per day. After that, the answer to "what now" is always the next line down. There is nothing to negotiate, which removes the moment where negotiation happens.
It also stops the specific dodge where you work around the difficult item all day while remaining technically busy. That dodge is the reason eat the frog exists as a separate method, and the two agree completely on this point: the hardest thing goes first, and the small satisfying work is a reward rather than a warm-up.
The order does not survive reality perfectly, of course. A genuine block, an unanswered colleague, a system that is down, all of these stop item one legitimately. Mark it blocked and move down. What the rule forbids is skipping an item because you do not fancy it.
The roll-over signal
Here is the part almost no write-up mentions, and it is the most diagnostically useful thing the method produces.
Track how many times each item has rolled over.
One roll is a normal day. Two is a busy week. But an item that has moved forward five days in a row is telling you something specific, and it is not that you lack discipline. In my experience it is always one of three things:
It is a project, not a task. "Sort out the accounts" cannot be finished in a sitting, so it can never be ticked, so it rolls forever. Break it into something with an end.
It is a decision you are avoiding. The task is blocked on a judgement you have not made, and no amount of scheduling will unblock it. Make the decision, or write the decision itself as the task.
It was never yours. Someone handed it to you, or you inherited it, and it keeps failing to become urgent because it genuinely is not your job. Hand it back or drop it.
The Ivy Lee method planner on this site counts the roll-overs and flags an item that has rolled five times, because that number is more honest than memory. It also dims everything below your current task in a working mode, keeps the seventh item refused on purpose, and stores everything in your browser with no account. The flag is a prompt to do one of the three things above instead of moving the item a sixth time.
Planning at the end of the day
The method specifies the evening for a reason, and it happens to line up with something worth having anyway.
Writing tomorrow's six is a natural last act of the working day. It closes open loops, which is the thing that otherwise follows you to dinner, and it means tomorrow starts with the decision already made. A morning that begins with a list is a different morning from one that begins with a blank page.
If you already run a shutdown routine, the six-item list slots into it directly. The shutdown ritual checklist is the version of that I use, built on Cal Newport's sequence, with tomorrow's priorities as one of the steps.
When six is too many
Six deep tasks is a fantasy day for a lot of people.
If you are in a meeting-heavy role, a reactive one like support or operations, a clinical shift, or you are the person a small child comes to first, the honest capacity for self-directed tasks is not six. It might be two.
The test is your own roll-over data. If most of the list rolls over most days for a week, the number is wrong and no amount of trying harder will fix it. Drop to three. Treat anything beyond three as a bonus. A short list you finish teaches you your real capacity. A long list you abandon teaches you to distrust lists.
This is also where the method's rigidity stops being helpful. A day of interruptions does not have a top-down shape, and pretending otherwise means ending every day with a red list and a sense of failure, which is how people quit systems. The never-miss-twice logic in how to stop quitting habits applies here too: a bad Tuesday is a bad Tuesday, and the pattern that actually ends a routine is not one bad day but two skipped evenings of planning in a row.
What the method does not handle
Appointments. It is a task list, not a calendar. Meetings do not belong on it unless there is preparation to do, and if your day is mostly appointments you need a schedule as well as a ranking.
Interrupts. There is no inbox in this method, and no place for something urgent that arrives at 11am. In practice you either bump it to the top and accept the roll-over, or you keep a separate capture list and process it at the end of the day. The second one is closer to the spirit of it.
Anything beyond tomorrow. Six items is a daily instrument with no memory. It cannot tell you whether the right things have been in the list for the past month, which is a weekly question and needs a weekly review to answer. A perfectly executed Ivy Lee week pointed at the wrong work is still the wrong work, and the method will never notice.
A hundred years on
What is remarkable about the Ivy Lee method is not the cheque. It is that a routine written before the invention of the modern office still describes the two decisions that actually matter in a day: what goes on the list, and what order it gets done in. Every app since has added features to those two decisions. Very few have improved them.
Six items, ranked tonight, worked top down tomorrow. If five of them roll over, that is not a failure of the method, it is data about your week, and it is the most useful thing the routine will give you.
Last updated: October 2026.
Written by Eusebiu, the solo founder building Loggd in public. I build the app in the evenings around contract work and a small daughter, which is why my own six is usually a three. I share what the aggregate data keeps showing on Threads.
See the pattern across weeks, not just days. Loggd records your tasks and daily practice as a contribution grid, so a heavy week reads as a heavy week instead of a broken streak. Start free.
