The Focus5 method: how I plan 5 tasks a day

People ask me how I manage my goals and my work with everything I have going on. This is the answer, and it is going to sound too simple.

I do not use a fancy app for it. Over the years I tried different platforms, different applications, Pomodoro, making a schedule, building discipline. All of it. Some of those apps are genuinely very good, they just did not work out for me. That does not mean they will not work for you.

The thing that actually worked was a diary. I wrote 5 things in it every night, and I did that for almost five years before I built any software. Here is exactly how I run it.

People tell me this is the Ivy Lee method, and they are close. That one is six tasks written the night before, put in order of importance, and worked top to bottom without starting the second before the first is done. Mine is five, and I do not rank them. I go with the flow of the day and pick whichever of the five fits the hour I am in.

One difference is worth knowing if you came here from Ivy Lee. That method tells you to carry what you did not finish onto tomorrow’s list, and I do that by hand in the diary. The app does not re-date anything for me. An unfinished task keeps the date I gave it and comes back under Overdue, so I can still see that I did not do it.

The Ivy Lee method, in full, including what an app can and cannot do for it.

I recorded this before the app existed, holding the actual diary I was using at the time. Same method, no software.

I do the same thing for work, except it is not a diary, it is a document in Google Docs. Every time I ship something I write it down. I made a big pull request, so I write down what the pull request was, what the feature was, and the GitHub link. I fix a nasty bug, it goes in. I help with something that was not even my job as an Android developer, that goes in too.

Then the appraisal comes around and the form asks what I achieved this year and what I am proud of. Most people cannot remember past October and end up filling that form in a rush against a deadline, forgetting half of what they did. It costs them their bonus. I just summarise my list.

I cannot tell you how well this has worked for me. When I share it, my managers are surprised. They ask if I really kept a record of all of it, and tell me they had forgotten some of it was even done.

It also helps on the days I open LinkedIn or Facebook, see what everybody else has built, and start thinking I have done nothing. That is imposter syndrome talking, and the log is the evidence against it. Be proud of your work.

A notebook is genuinely enough. I used one for five years. I built Focus5 for the parts paper could not do.

I can add tasks by talking instead of writing, and it sorts and dates them for me. Focus mode does the part my diary never could: it hands me the next task with the timer already running, in the order I would have picked anyway, and keeps five in view so the rest stays out of my way. And it tells me where my time actually went, which a paper page cannot.

It costs $29 once. There is no monthly plan, because I did not want to build something that has to keep justifying a bill every month.