Reblog

Ivy Lee and the evolution of modern time management

Just recently I learned about Ivy Lee (not the actress) who is considered one of the first public relations specialist in history. Ivy Lee is considered also the “inventor” of a simple yet powerful focus management technique branded “top 5” in our modern times by Cameron Herold.

The technique can be summarized as follow:

• At the end of the current working day write down the six most important things you should do next day
• Start from the top of the list first thing next working day and stick with it until done
• Start executing the next task only after you finish with the current one
• At the end of the day reconsider priorities and create a new task list

The short sized list forces you to consider what really matters and leave everything else out. It turns out that your main priorities follow the Pareto Principle and you should end up doing 80% of what really matters with those top priorities. What I just told you is the short explanation but please read the more “romantic” full story about how Bethlehem Steel Corporation was able to become one of the largest steel producer in the US thanks to Ivy Lee advices.

Top5 includes a lot of what is used in modern time management techniques like the Pomodoro Technique or GTD. The Pomodoro Technique focuses on sequential execution of tasks extracted from a prioritized todo-today list which only contains tasks worth the capacity planned for that day. GTD contains (amongst the rest) the notion of current/tomorrow (and then monthly. quarterly and life-time) most important achievements. Both GTD and the PT then expands the concept in different ways and directions making it a complete (and complicated) framework.

The simplicity of Top5 is only apparent: it requires a fair amount of self-discipline to list the top priorities and execute them, leaving a lot of room for misinterpretation and mistakes. Teamly.com, a website I discovered recently, gives its Top5 interpretation adding a few features to help you out.

For example a today’s priority can’t be edited after 20 minutes from creation to force you really consider if this is a top priority or not. Of course you can’t create more than 5 but you can create other priorities for the next day, next week or month. In general an user of the technique is delegated the following decisions:

• How big a priority should be
• How to prioritize them
• How to maintain focus on the current task (despite internal or external interruptions)
• How to measure effectiveness in tasks execution

and possibly more. My impression is that Top5 is too easy to execute incorrectly “as is” bringing to early failure. Top5 has very few prescriptions and hence is more an expert tool and a good candidate for integration with other time management techniques.