Charles Schwab paid $25,000 for a list with six items on it
A consultant gave the steel magnate one instruction and refused payment until Schwab decided for himself what it was worth.
In 1918, consultant Ivy Lee met with Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, and offered a method for free: each evening, write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow, rank them by importance, and work through the list in order the next day. Unfinished items carried over. Nothing else got started until the ranked ones were done. Lee told Schwab to try it for as long as he liked, then pay whatever he thought it was worth.
A few weeks later, a check for $25,000 arrived — equivalent to roughly $400,000 today. Schwab later called it the most profitable lesson of his career, and he had the whole plant management team adopt it.
The method has no dashboard, no software, no theory of motivation attached to it. It works by removing a single decision — what do I do next — from the middle of the day, where it gets answered by whatever email arrived last. The ranking happens once, the night before, when nothing is on fire yet. Everything after that is just execution in order.