Look, the whole method fits on a napkin.
At the end of the day you write the six most important things for tomorrow. You number them 1 to 6 by importance. Next day you start at 1 and do not move to 2 until 1 is done. Whatever is left tops tomorrow's list.
That is it.
And it is because it has no moving parts that it fails so many people. A method with no machinery dumps the entire effort on you.
The 25,000-dollar invoice nobody has ever seen
You have read the story. In 1918 Ivy Lee — the man who more or less invented public relations — supposedly taught this to Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel in fifteen minutes and said: pay me whatever you think it was worth. Three months later, a cheque for 25,000 dollars arrived.
Let me save you some time: that cheque never turned up.
There is no letter, no receipt, nothing written at the time. Ivy Lee died in 1934 and the story only appears in print decades later, in management books from the 1960s and 70s. The Unseen Power, Scott Cutlip's standard history of public relations, repeats it — but that came out in 1994. Even the writer who brought the method back into fashion admits he never found an original source.
And do not get me wrong: this does not sink the method. It sinks the argument most used to sell it: the price someone supposedly paid.
Why the rule holds up without the legend
No research has tested the whole method. Three lines of study do support pieces of it.
A specific goal beats a vague one. Locke and Latham reviewed 35 years of goal-setting research in American Psychologist in 2002. The finding is boring in its consistency: specific, difficult goals produce more effort and more performance than "do your best". "Finish the client proposal" is not "get ahead on work".
Deciding in advance beats deciding in the moment. Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 studies on "if this happens, then I do that" plans and found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, d = .65. What is measured is not the intention: it is the decision already being made before the moment of acting.
Leaving mid-task is expensive. Sophie Leroy published two experiments in 2009 on what she called attention residue: drop an unfinished task and jump to another, and part of your head stays stuck on the first while performance on the second drops. And finishing was not enough on its own — time pressure at the close was needed for people to let go.
Where the six lines break
Now the part nobody writes. Numbering six items by importance is not writing six things. It is fifteen pairwise comparisons, each item against every other. And "importance" is not one measure: there is the deadline, who is waiting, the consequence, how much it weighs on you. You are sorting against a ruler that does not exist.
Add the effect of too much choice. Iyengar and Lepper ran a tasting booth with 6 jam flavours one day and 24 the next. The 24 drew more people. But among those who stopped, 30% bought at the 6-jam booth and only 3% at the 24-jam one. More choice attracts and then freezes. Thirty loose ends to turn into six numbered lines is that booth, every night, tired.
And the list is written by the you of 11pm and carried out by the you of 9am. One decides, the other pays. If task 1 needs your best head and that only shows up at 3pm, the no-skipping rule becomes a chair you sit in producing nothing.
How to write the six when deciding is exactly what you lack
What stays on you
The method gives no help with the one thing it demands. It asks for a hard decision every day and offers no support in making it: it does not remember yesterday's leftovers, does not know the 10am meeting got cancelled, does not notice you are three hours into item 1. The paper shows the order you chose and takes part in nothing else.
Why I built it this way
I used that list for years and what floored me was never the doing — it was sitting down at eleven at night to rank six things with my head already off. The method's heavy work sat exactly where I had least to give.
That is why in ASB the order gets built in the conversation: you say what you have and it hands back the six, numbered, for you to accept or reshuffle.