The Ivy Lee Method
Six tasks, chosen the night before, worked in order. Where the method came from, who it suits, and how the Ivy Lee kit sets it up.
The oldest productivity method with a name on it, and still one of the best. This page covers what the Ivy Lee method is, who it suits, and how the Ivy Lee kit sets your day page up for it.
What it is
At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things to do tomorrow. No more than six. Put them in order of importance. Tomorrow, start with the first one and work on it until it's done, then move to the second. Whatever doesn't get finished moves onto tomorrow evening's six. That's the whole method.
The story goes that Ivy Lee, a publicity consultant, taught this routine to the executives of Bethlehem Steel around 1918, told the company to pay him whatever it turned out to be worth, and received a check for $25,000 a few months later. The story is probably polished from a century of retelling, but the method survives because it keeps working.
Whose brain it fits
Ivy Lee suits people whose lists have grown longer than their days. If you keep forty things in front of you and pick by mood, six ranked tasks is a relief: the deciding happens once, the night before, and the morning starts with doing.
It's also kind to decision-fatigued brains. You never stand in front of the day wondering what to work on, the list already knows. And if half-finished days leave you feeling behind, the built-in rule that unfinished tasks simply join tomorrow's six takes the sting out. In Finalist that move is called punting, and it was never a failure here to begin with.
It fits less well if your day belongs to other people. When the plan explodes by 10am, a ranked list of six becomes fiction; Time Blocking around your meetings may serve you better, or just a plain day page you re-decide at lunch.
Why it usually fails
Three ways, mostly. The six quietly becomes sixteen, because nothing pushes back when you add a seventh. Picking six means telling the other tasks no, and that's the actual work, so people skip the ranking and keep a pile. And the evening ritual is the first thing dropped in a busy week, at which point the method is gone: morning-you inherits an empty page and starts improvising.
The useful core
Strip the ritual away and two ideas remain. A hard limit makes capacity honest: the page has an edge, and the edge is information. And ranking forces the one decision that matters, which is not "what could I do" but "what comes first." You can borrow those two ideas without adopting anything else.
How the kit sets it up
Open Customize at the bottom of the Daily tab and find Ivy Lee under Ways to Plan. The kit strips the page down to the day's tasks and the new-task line, and sets a six-item limit on the To Dos section. The Tasks header keeps score ("4 / 6"), and anything past six waits below the fold, out of sight but never lost.
The kit also offers an evening reminder, a quiet nudge at day's end to pick tomorrow's six while today is still fresh. That reminder is the method's engine; I'd keep it on for the first two weeks at least.
Your own arrangement stays protected as My setup. Tap Return to My setup on the desk in Customize to bring it back, even after trying other kits. Your work stays with you. The optional evening reminder starts off; if you enable it, returning does not switch it off.
Related: One Day at a Time · The Art of Punting · Customize Your Daily