How following UARF’s 100-year-old productivity tip made 2020 a surprisingly productive year

By Elyse Ball 

​First, a confession: I don’t always try out the tips and hacks that we include in our UARF email newsletter. I should… but I have to admit that I don’t.

But every so often, a hack comes along that is so well suited to solving my problems that I immediately give it a try.

In February 2020, we published a blog written by our talented UARF intern Kenny Aronson on a 100-year old productivity tip used by captains on industry in the early 1900s: the Ivy Lee Method for Increasing Productivity.
Here’s how it works:

1. At the end of your workday, write down the 6 most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow.
2. Next, rank the 6 items in order of how important they are.
3. On the next day, focus on only the first task. You can only move to the second task after finishing the first.
4. Work through your entire list the same way. At the end of the day, create a new list of 6 tasks (including any you didn’t finish).
5. Rinse and repeat.

I know that this seems super simple, and it is. It just requires discipline to do this every day and intellectual honestly to rank which tasks are really important.

Why did this tip seem relevant to me?

•  I have a lot of competing priorities – requirements from UARF’s funders and requests from startup companies – that feel like a sandstorm engulfing me.
• My task list is always crammed 100 things to do that are supposedly urgent, but might not actually be important.
• I know that I sometimes fail to do small, straightforward tasks that will really “move the needle” toward long-term success.

If this sounds even a little bit like your life, I’d recommend giving the simple, old-school Ivy Lee Method a try. I’ve been using this method for almost a year now, and I’ve found it has helped me tremendously to:

• Set my own priorities, rather than letting others set them for me.
• Cull my task list down to a manageable number of items – both by being more productive and by eliminating some stuff that doesn’t matter.
• Get the most important, most impactful tasks done now.
•  Feel a greater sense of accomplishment.

In addition to the straightforward method outlined above, here are a few tips from
my experience implementing the method.

6 isn’t the only magic number:
Not everyone has a job or the kind of task list that allows you to get 6 tasks done a day. That’s okay. I had actually tried this method out in 2018 with 3 tasks a day, and it didn’t work for me at all. (I’m an eternal optimist and 3 tasks didn’t seem like very many, so I’d just put my 3 tasks off until the afternoon and then not get them done.) Different numbers of tasks are optimal for different people, and you might need to play around a bit to figure out what your magic number is.

Actually write down the tasks:
A mental list is not a substitute for an actual written list. You can keep your list digitally in an app like Things or Google Tasks, or you can write them on a sticky note. But I’ve found that actually writing the tasks down triggers some mental switch that helps me commit to doing them.

Delete stuff off your task list:
Prioritizing is great, but focusing is even better. Each Friday, I look at my list of potential tasks for the coming week. For each task, I ask myself: Is this important? What will happen if I don’t do this task? Any task that I don’t think is important gets deleted from the list, and I’ve found that most of the time nothing bad happens.

Be kind to yourself:
No one – I mean, NO ONE – is going to get all 6 tasks done every single day. It’s great to strive, but also remember to be kind to yourself when you don’t reach your goals. Just move anything you didn’t get done to the next day, and move on. No big deal. So to wrap up, try the Ivy Lee Method out. It’s a super simple method that works surprisingly well in a super complicated world.

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