How To Use The Ivy Lee Planning Strategy for Better Productivity
A daily planning strategy can be an essential tool for anyone looking to stay organized and productive. It provides a way to break down complex tasks into manageable chunks, prioritize tasks, and track progress over time.
With a daily planning strategy in place, it is easier to focus on the Most Important Tasks (MITs) and achieve your goals faster.
A good planning strategy should have 3 things:
The flexibility to accommodate different types of tasks, such as recurring ones or one-off projects.
It should be able to integrate with other tools that you use regularly, such as calendars or task management apps.
It should provide an easy way for users to track their progress over time so they can make adjustments as needed.
One of my favorite planning methods is the Ivy Lee Strategy.
Why does it work and why do I love it?
Simply put, because it’s simple.
The Ivy Lee Strategy requires you to make hard decisions.
One of the best things you can do when your brain is full of ideas, or you are feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list is to trim the fat.
It forces you to get really serious with yourself when you are focused on eliminating those tasks that aren’t absolutely necessary.
We all have countless things we’d like to do every day, and we may even consider many of those things to be tasks we must do. But the truth is that imposing limits on yourself can make you a more productive person.
If you try to do everything, you usually end up getting nothing meaningful accomplished.
There are six steps that you can take to create an effective daily planning strategy. With these steps, you will be able to maximize your productivity and make sure that every day is productive and successful.
The Ivy Lee PLANNING Strategy
Step 1: At the end of each day, jot down the six most important tasks you must accomplish the next day. ONLY six. Don’t write more than that.
These can be work or personal tasks. (You could actually do a separate list for both!)
Step 2: Prioritize those six tasks in order of how important they are and how much they will have an impact on your end goals.
Step 3: The next day when you start working, focus ONLY on the first task. Work on it until it is finished before you move on to the next item on the list.
Step 4: Continue down the list, marking off each item as you complete it. Remember, you prioritized this list yesterday, so there’s no need to jump around between tasks – stick with the priority order you already lined up.
Step 5: At the end of the day, move any tasks you didn’t complete to a new list of six tasks for the next day.
This is also a good time to re-evaluate each item and decide if it’s really one of the most important tasks you need to complete.
Step 6: Repeat this process every day (or every working day)
That’s it!
This strategy eliminates the friction of getting started. For most people, getting started is the biggest hurdle!
Creating your prioritized list the day before allows you to just sit down and get to work the next day without spending hours waffling back and forth about what to work on. Just getting started is as important to your success as finishing.
Effective productivity strategies require focus, and this strategy works because it gets rid of multi-tasking.
As much as people like to think they are multi-tasking machines that can accomplish all the things at once, science says otherwise.
Multi-tasking has been shown repeatedly to be inefficient. You can’t do great on the task at hand when your attention is divided a million different ways.
Here are 6 more Strategies for Daily Planning and Better Productivity and here are My 10 Best Planning Tips and Tricks.
Share your thoughts
Have you ever used this planning strategy? Did you like it and keep using it? Let me know in the comments or send me a message at maria@kraftyplanner.com. I read and respond to everyone personally.
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