[The Ivy Lee method] forces me to identify my top priorities, and think honestly about what I can and can’t do in a day.
How can we make decisions, stay on track, and do what we need to? Enter a 100-year-old productivity tool called the Ivy Lee method, which can help you beat decision fatigue by streamlining your to-do list and reducing multitasking. It might have been created in the early 1900s, but can be just as useful today to help you focus and do what you really need to.
Experts In This Article
- Charlotte Rooney, a leadership and anti-burnout mentor and coach for women leaders at A Half Managed Mind
- Jess Wass, a career coach and consultant who specializes in helping overachievers realign their career with their life
- Laura Vanderkam1, Laura Vanderkam is a productivity and time-management expert and the author of several books, including her latest, The New Corner Office.
What is the Ivy Lee method?
The Ivy Lee method was developed by Ivy Lee, a productivity consultant who was reportedly hired by Charles M. Schwab in 1918 to help improve efficiency at his company, Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Lee came up with this method to help people both plan and do their work.
The method is as follows:
- The night before work, write a list of six (and only six!) tasks for the next day in priority order.
- In the morning, start working on your list in order, and give each task your full attention—no multitasking.
- Only move onto the next task when you have finished the one before.
- At the end of the day, if you have tasks still left, add them to the start of your list for tomorrow, and repeat.
How does this technique work?
The Ivy Lee method is fairly simple, but it’s effective for several reasons. For starters, making a limited list of to-dos forces you to be realistic about what you can accomplish. “People will sometimes create to-do lists with 100 items on there, but that’s not a to-do list, it’s a wish list,” says Laura Vanderkam, author of several time management and productivity books, including Tranquility by Tuesday. Overestimating, she explains, just means a longer list and then feeling bad about not completing it.
This process is useful not just for what you put on but for what you leave off. Identifying your priority tasks “will reduce overwhelm because it shows you how much of what you have been worrying about is noise,” says Charlotte Rooney, anti-burnout mentor and coach at A Half Managed Mind.
I’ve personally been using the Ivy Lee method for a couple of years and find the list-making step really difficult. It forces me to identify my top priorities, and think honestly about what I can and can’t do in a day.
By planning ahead, the Ivy Lee method also ensures you start each day with a road map of tasks, rather than ping-ponging from decision to decision in the moment. Our ability to make decisions is like a car’s fuel tank, says career coach and consultant Jess Wass, who specializes in helping people realign their career with their life. “We start the day with a full tank but as the day goes on with all the decisions we make, our energy levels start to drop. When it drops enough, we’d have a harder time making decisions and we start to feel overwhelmed.”
“It is a tool to help you achieve your goals, not a standard you have to live up to.” —Charlotte Rooney, anti-burnout mentor and coach, A Half Managed Mind
You can reduce decision fatigue in part through habits—like having a go-to “work uniform” à la Steve Jobs, always having the same thing for breakfast, or making an Ivy Lee list the night before. That way when you sit down to work, you haven’t used up any decision-making gas and instead focus more energy on how you are going to do what needs to get done.
Your streamlined Ivy Lee list means you’ll always know what you need to focus on even if you get pulled off track, too. (Because random emails or last-minute requests from your boss will always come up.) “We have a moment of thinking, What was I supposed to be doing? And if you don’t have a quick answer to that, we start to panic internally,” says Wass. While you might otherwise slip into productive procrastination—reaching for the easiest, but not necessarily most important thing—Ivy Lee means you have a plan and way to bring your attention back.
Planning ahead means you are more likely to make decisions which favor longer-term, often more important goals instead of quick wins, adds Rooney. “Focussing on impact rather than ease of execution changes the order that you tackle problems in. Rather than knocking off the easy things first, the Ivy Lee method tells us to start with what is important and will make the biggest difference.”
How to use the Ivy Lee method to get sh*t done
While Ivy Lee advocated for six tasks and always working in order, his 1918 workday likely contained fewer meetings and certainly no Zoom calls. Meaning that for a modern workplace—where 37 percent of employee time is spent in meetings—some tweaks to this method are warranted.
For example, you don’t need to force yourself to list out six tasks. For some people, especially those with meeting-heavy jobs, six tasks might be too many, but you can tweak it to work for modern schedules – maybe three or four tasks works better for you.
Completing tasks in order might be less feasible for some work schedules, too. “You might be better served by figuring out when you’ll do each item on your list based on how much time you have available,” says Vanderkam. This could mean doing lower priority but quicker tasks in between morning meetings and focusing on your longer, more important tasks when you have a bigger break later in the day.
Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t managed to cross all six tasks off your list or weaponize it to make you feel bad about yourself. “It is a tool to help you achieve your goals, not a standard you have to live up to,” says Rooney. Ivy Lee could trigger perfectionist or overworking behaviors in some people, so don’t be afraid to set a hard boundary around when you are finishing work and make peace with sometimes having tasks left over.
You might feel like you are doing less to start with, but you’re finishing fewer tasks because they are more important, complicated ones. “If you’ve gotten used to running on adrenaline and dopamine from being very busy, reactive and short-term focussed, this kind of shift can feel uncomfortable at first,” says Rooney.
Don’t expect to be perfect at it straight away. “You’re learning a new system, so you will have to try, test, review, and adjust for a bit,” Rooney explains. She says you might over or underestimate how much you can do or feel stuck wondering how to prioritize tasks, but don’t let that put you off. “Try what feels good enough, and then reflect at the end of the day. Use the information to plan differently the next day and keep tweaking until it works for you.”
None of us can ever get everything done every day. But by thinking ahead, Ivy Lee can help us focus on the tasks that really matter. It’s an old method that still works today to simplify the to-do list, reduce our need to make endless decisions, and hopefully, feel a little bit better about the way we work. Treated as a framework that can be tweaked for modern life, choosing to try it could be one decision that helps reduce, rather than add to, your decision fatigue.
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- Chernev, Alexander, et al. “Choice Overload: A Conceptual Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp. 333–58, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.08.002.