Want to be more productive at work? Try the Ivy Lee Method.
If you have a role with competing tasks (and let’s face it, who doesn’t these days) and you might go home at the end of the day and think to yourself “I achieved nothing” and the days might feel very long and that you’re going in circles.
It might be time to consider how you’re working, and that might mean switching it up so you can get the most out of each day and go home feeling stronger and that you have things under a bit more control than previous days.
According to a recent study there is still a good percentage of employees suffering from “societal pandemic burnout” (say that five times really, fast) meaning we had met our limits mentally, emotionally, and physically. You know, tired but not normal tired.
I give you The Ivy Lee Method!
The story goes that in 1918, a man named Charles M.Schwab was known to be one of the most successful business owners in the world. He owned a steel corporation and wanted to further innovate his workplace.
To increase productivity, he enlisted the help of a productivity consultant, Ivy Lee to advise him in this. Quite simply it is an easy routine to effectively help with “maximising productivity” and who doesn’t need some of that.
How it works!
What you do, is at the start of your working week and day, you write down 6 of the most critical things you need to accomplish. That’s the rule, no more than six. Write them in order of importance and then simply start working on them. Start on the first task, and do not attempt the next task until it is completed in its entirety.
Anything on that list that’s unfinished by the end of the day (which is inevitable and nothing to beat yourself up about) just moves over to the next day.
Now if you’re “Super-Fly” and storm through those six items halfway through the day, then (you probably don’t need this hack anyway 😊) you make another list of six and get cracking.
Basically, that list is the last thing you do before finishing work for the day, and the first thing you look at before you begin.
It sounds simple, right? But does it work?
For a productivity hack to work, it must be very simple and intuitive. The beauty of the Ivy Lee method is that it allows for those silly little tasks that will inevitably come up and throw your entire day out. It means you can’t vastly overestimate how much you can get done in a day, and it provides a clear focus on what tasks are achievable.
The method removes the friction of starting as the biggest barrier to getting things done can sometimes be starting them. Most of us know the feeling of deciding to work on one task, then finding it too difficult, so starting another, and then wondering if you should be doing something else instead, allowing that process of decision making to take up the whole day.
The method also means you focus on one thing at a time. No multi-tasking, which can often mean dividing your attention 15 different ways and doing a bunch of jobs poorly.