The Ivy Lee method: six tasks a day, one at a time

The Ivy Lee method is named after the consultant who taught it, and the story usually told is that a steel company paid him a great deal of money for it. The figure gets repeated a lot and checked very little, so treat it as a good story rather than a fact. The method survived on its own merits either way.

What makes it last is that it removes a decision. Most productivity advice adds work: a system to maintain, tags to keep tidy, a weekly review to skip. This one asks you to decide once, the night before, and then stop deciding.

A long list feels like progress when you write it and like failure when you read it. Six is small enough that you have to choose, and choosing is the work most people avoid. It is the same reason the number is fixed rather than left to you: if the list can grow, it will, and then you are back to a wall of text at 9am.

It is also why the order matters. Ranking six things takes a minute at night and saves you the same decision, badly made, at every point in the day when you finish something and wonder what is next.

There are several small ones on the app stores, most doing the same thing: six slots, a list for tomorrow, tick as you go. A notebook does it too, and did for a century.

What software can add is the part paper cannot do. Paper cannot start a timer, cannot hand you the next task, and cannot tell you afterwards where the day actually went.

Focus5 is not an Ivy Lee app and does not claim to be. It runs the same shape of day from a different angle, and it is worth being exact about where the two agree and where they do not.

What matches. A small number of tasks in view instead of the whole list. One at a time rather than a board you scan. Focus mode hands you the next task with the timer already running, so the moment Ivy Lee cares about, the one where you finish something and have to decide again, does not happen. Five is the default and the setting runs from three to ten, so you can set it to six and match the method.

Ranking matches too, and you have to go looking for it. Drag the tasks on your Today screen into the order you want and Focus mode works through them in that order. That is Ivy Lee step two. The difference is that here it is optional rather than a step you are told to take: if you never drag anything, tasks sit in the order you added them, and Focus still hands them to you one at a time.

What does not match. Your order applies inside a day, not across the whole queue. Today comes first, then anything still open from before with the newest day first, then upcoming, and you do not rank across those groups. Ivy Lee also says do not start the second task until the first is finished, and Focus5 gives you a Later button that sinks the current task to the tail. That is softer than the method on purpose, and if the strictness is the part you want, the method on paper is stricter than this app.

And it does not rewrite your list. Ivy Lee tells you to carry what you did not finish onto tomorrow’s list of six. Nothing in Focus5 ever changes a task date on its own. An unfinished task keeps the date you gave it and comes back under Overdue, grouped by the day it was due, so you can see what slipped rather than watching it quietly become tomorrow’s problem. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of what the paper method asks. If you want the rewrite, you do it by hand.

There is a longer version of this on the 5 task method, which is the same idea run in a paper diary for almost five years before any of this existed.