The Ivy Lee method is a daily routine with one rule: at the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow, rank them, and work through them in order, one at a time. Whatever is unfinished moves to the next day's list. It takes about five minutes in the evening, and it removes the one decision that eats the start of most working days, which is what to do first. This post covers the steps, the places the method breaks, and how to run it on a kanban board instead of a sheet of paper.
What is the Ivy Lee method?
It is a prioritisation routine from 1918. As the story is usually told, Charles M. Schwab, then president of Bethlehem Steel, asked the consultant Ivy Lee for a way to get more done. Lee asked for fifteen minutes with each executive and said Schwab could pay whatever he thought it was worth after three months. James Clear's account of the story puts the cheque at $25,000, which is also the figure other write-ups repeat. Treat the number as folklore, since it comes from retellings and not from a primary source.
What matters is the routine itself, and it has been stable for a century:
- Before you stop work, write down six tasks for tomorrow. No more than six.
- Rank them by real importance.
- Next morning, start with task one and work on nothing else until it is done.
- Move to task two, then three, and so on.
- When the day ends, carry anything unfinished into a fresh list of six.
The top-ranked pages for this method all describe those five steps in nearly the same words. None of them shows what the list looks like once you stop writing it on paper, which is the part below.
Why does the Ivy Lee method work?
Three constraints do the work. The list is capped, so you cannot avoid choosing. It is written the night before, so the choice is made while you are no longer in the middle of the day's noise. And it is strictly sequential, so you cannot spread yourself over six half-finished things.
The cap is the strongest of the three. A to-do list with forty items asks you to decide again every time you look at it. A list of six asks once. If you have read about WIP limits, the shape is familiar: the Ivy Lee list is a limit on work committed to a day, and the one-at-a-time rule is a limit of one on work in progress.
How do you run the Ivy Lee method on a kanban board?
Make a board with four columns: Backlog, Tomorrow, Doing and Done. Everything you might ever do lives in Backlog. The other three columns are the method.
In the evening, spend five minutes on the routine:
- Look at what is left in Tomorrow and Doing from today. These are your carry-over, and they stay where they are.
- Pull cards from Backlog into Tomorrow until it holds six. If carry-over already fills it, stop. The cap applies to the total, not to new cards.
- Drag the cards into rank order, most important at the top.
In the morning, move the top card into Doing and set the column limit to one. When it is done, move it to Done and pull the next one. If something urgent interrupts, create a card for it, put it in Doing above the one you were on, and finish it first. The interruption is visible instead of silently displacing your plan.
The board does two things a paper list cannot. Carry-over takes no rewriting, because an unfinished card is already in the right place. And Done keeps a record, so after a week you can see how many of your six you actually finish. That number is more useful than any productivity score.
Where does the Ivy Lee method break down?
It breaks on any day that is mostly made of other people. If your work is meetings, support requests or reviews, a list written the night before is out of date by ten. The method assumes a day you control.
It also handles large tasks badly. "Write the proposal" is not a task you finish in one sitting, so it sits at rank one for four days, and the list starts to feel like a record of failure. The fix is to put only a next action on the list, such as "Draft section 2 of the proposal", and keep the large item as a card in Backlog. This is the same reason GTD insists on next actions, and it matters more here than anywhere.
A third problem is that it ranks but does not tell you how. The original routine says to order by "true importance" and stops. If you cannot tell what is important, the list becomes the six easiest things. That is where a sorting aid helps, and the Eisenhower matrix on a kanban board is a good one: sort the Backlog by urgent and important first, and pull the Tomorrow cards from the top quadrant.
Finally, six is a convention, not a law. People with a lot of interruptions drop to three, and some who work in long deep blocks use four. If you consistently finish only half of your six, the list is too long. Cut it before you cut your standards.
How is it different from a weekly review or a plain to-do list?
A plain to-do list has no cap and no order, so it grows. The Ivy Lee list is a to-do list with a ceiling and a sequence, rebuilt every evening.
A weekly review works at the opposite scale. The review decides what the week contains, and the evening routine picks the day's six from that. They fit together without overlap: Sunday sets the pool, and each evening takes a small bite from it. If you want the broader picture of keeping a board calm enough to use every day, a simple kanban system covers it. A free board on EasyKanban's minimal kanban page is enough to try the four-column setup without an account.
FAQ
What is the Ivy Lee method in simple terms?
Each evening you write the six most important tasks for tomorrow and rank them. Next day you work through them in order, one at a time, and finish each before starting the next. Anything left over goes onto the following day's list of six.
Why six tasks and not five or ten?
Six is the number in the original story, and there is no research behind it. It is large enough to fill a day and small enough to finish. If you rarely complete six, use fewer. The point is a firm cap, not the specific number.
Does the Ivy Lee method work for teams?
It works for individuals inside a team, because each person keeps their own list of six. It does not work as a shared team plan, since a team's day is shaped by dependencies. Teams usually do better with shared columns and a limit on work in progress.
Should I plan the list in the evening or the morning?
The evening is the original advice, and it holds up. You choose with less pressure, you can stop thinking about work, and you start the morning with a decision already made. A morning list works if you do it before opening email or chat.
Can I use the Ivy Lee method with other systems like GTD?
Yes. GTD gives you the full list of next actions and the weekly review that keeps it honest. The Ivy Lee routine then picks six of those for the next day. Use GTD to decide what exists and Ivy Lee to decide what is tomorrow.