Do It Tomorrow and the 25/5 Rule: Protecting a Short List From Everything Else

What each one is actually for

Do It Tomorrow

Do It Tomorrow, a method from Mark Forster, starts each day with a list you commit to before anything else happens — the tasks you decided, in a calmer moment, actually matter today. The rule that makes it work is what happens next: anything that arrives after that — a colleague's request, an email that feels urgent, an idea you want to chase — does not go onto today's list no matter how pressing it feels in the moment. It goes onto tomorrow's list, unactioned, and you return to what you already committed to. This isn't procrastination in the usual sense, because the new item isn't being avoided forever — it's being handled on a delay long enough that today's plan, decided while you were thinking clearly this morning, doesn't get overwritten by whatever's loudest this afternoon.

25/5 Rule

The 25/5 Rule has you sit down and write twenty-five things you genuinely want — goals, projects, ambitions, not just tasks — then circle the five that matter most. The part most people skip, and the part that actually makes the method work, is what happens to the other twenty: not 'get to later,' but actively avoid, meaning you turn down time, money, and effort aimed at them specifically because they're genuinely appealing and would otherwise quietly compete with the five you circled. The exercise assumes the twenty you didn't circle are not bad goals — if they were obviously bad, this would be an easy list to write and an easy one to ignore. The difficulty, and the entire point, is that they're good enough to distract you from the five that matter more.

What you get out of pairing them

Do It Tomorrow buys you a day that survives contact with other people's requests — the version of you who set today's list this morning, while calm, gets to outrank the version of you this afternoon who's tempted to drop everything for whatever just landed in your inbox. The 25/5 Rule buys you the same protection over a much longer horizon: the five goals you circled while thinking clearly about what actually matters get to outrank the twenty tempting alternatives that show up week after week disguised as good opportunities. Without either structure, the thing that wins isn't the worst option — it's whatever arrived most recently and sounds most urgent right now, which is a genuinely bad way to pick either a day or a decade. Put the two side by side and the real payoff is a plan that holds at two different timescales at once, instead of a day that survives but slowly drifts away from the goals it was supposed to serve, or a five-year list of priorities that looks right on paper while the actual Tuesdays never quite add up to it.

What Do It Tomorrow rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Closed lists reduce overwhelm practitioner report
  A fixed bounded list of tasks rather than an ever-growing open list reduces the felt overwhelm of an infinite to-do list.
• Deferred capture protects commitment practitioner report
  Writing newly arriving tasks onto tomorrow's list rather than acting on them immediately protects today's already-committed plan from being derailed by reactivity.

What 25/5 Rule rests on

• Constraint increases follow through observational studies
  Fixing the set of allowed choices in advance, before the moment of decision, produces more consistent follow-through than deciding in the moment.
• Cognitive load limits effective goal count observational studies
  Pursuing too many goals at once dilutes attention and reduces the odds of succeeding at any single one.
• Prioritization by elimination focuses effort practitioner report
  Actively identifying and avoiding lower-priority items rather than merely ranking them protects attention and resources for the top few.

Where they actually meet

Neither method treats 'ranked lower' as protection on its own. Do It Tomorrow doesn't just note that today's tasks matter more than an incoming request — it physically removes the incoming request from today's list, deferring it to tomorrow's, so there's no ongoing decision to make about it. The 25/5 Rule doesn't just note that the top five matter more than the other twenty — it turns the other twenty into things you actively decline, so saying no to them stops being a fresh decision every time one resurfaces and becomes a standing rule you already made. Both convert an ongoing willpower contest into a structure decided once.

The principle underneath both

A merely lower-ranked item doesn't stay quietly in its place — it keeps resurfacing and asking to be reconsidered, especially when it's genuinely appealing rather than obviously bad, and each fresh reconsideration is a chance for the actual priority to lose. Removing the item from consideration entirely — deferred to a fixed later point, or placed on a list to be actively avoided — ends the contest instead of merely scoring it.

What that makes the real goal

The objective underneath both, stated plainly: stop re-deciding the same priority fight every time a new, appealing option shows up, by building a structure that excludes the alternative in advance rather than trusting yourself to out-argue it in the moment it appears.

Other practices that serve the same goal

The Ivy Lee method — write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow, in order, and work strictly through them one at a time before touching anything else — reaches the same day-level objective as Do It Tomorrow through a stricter ordering rule rather than a deferral rule, and it's one of the oldest documented productivity techniques still in regular use. On the goal-scale side, many organizations that adopt OKRs — a goal-setting framework built around a small number of objectives per quarter — enforce a hard cap of three to five objectives specifically because more than that dilutes execution, which is the 25/5 Rule's exact logic applied to a company instead of a person, without necessarily naming an explicit avoid-list. A third route on the daily side is timeboxing with a hard stop — assigning a fixed end time to today's committed tasks rather than an open-ended 'until it's done' — which protects the list less by refusing new arrivals and more by refusing to let the existing list expand indefinitely to swallow whatever time is available.

A tradition that already does this

The Ivy Lee method, given to executives at Bethlehem Steel around 1918 and reportedly worth a fortune to the company's president, already combined both halves of this page a century early: a short, closed daily list decided the night before, worked in strict order, with everything else deliberately excluded until the list was done. It's a genuine, well-documented precedent that neither of these two later methods invented the core move — they're recent variations on something already proven to work long before either was written down.

Using Do It Tomorrow to Protect a Day for One of the Circled Five

When a task tied to one of your circled five is on today's list, treat every incoming request the way Do It Tomorrow prescribes for anything else: write it on tomorrow's list, unactioned, and return to the circled-five task. The habit is identical to the base method — the only change is which list you're protecting the hardest, and it works because the discipline of deferring new requests is already built; you're just aiming it specifically at defending time for a top-five goal instead of a generic day.

Using the 25/5 Rule to Decide What's Even Allowed Onto Tomorrow's List

Do It Tomorrow defers new items to tomorrow, but says nothing about what happens once they land there — and tomorrow's list can quietly fill up with deferred items from the avoid-list twenty just as easily as from the circled five. Before adding a deferred item to tomorrow's list, check it against your 25/5 avoid list first: if it belongs to one of the twenty, the honest move often isn't tomorrow — it's declining it outright, rather than letting 'do it tomorrow' become a polite way of eventually doing it anyway.

A Slack Message at 10:40 AM

You circled 'finish the client proposal' as one of your five real goals this quarter, and today's list — written at 8am, before the day got noisy — has three hours blocked for exactly that. At 10:40 a colleague messages asking if you can join a call about a different initiative, one of the twenty you didn't circle, framed as 'just twenty minutes, it'd really help.' It would help, genuinely — that's what makes the other twenty dangerous, they're not bad ideas. The old response would be joining, because refusing a reasonable, well-meant request feels worse in the moment than losing twenty minutes. Instead you write it on tomorrow's list, say so honestly ('can't today, happy to look tomorrow'), and go back to the proposal. Tomorrow, looking at that item again next to your actual five, you recognize it for what it is — a good, twenty-minute favor for something you already decided isn't one of your five things — and you decline it properly instead of doing it by default because it survived one day of deferral.

When this is worth reaching for

A specific pattern has already shown up: days go reasonably well when planned but keep getting eaten by reasonable-sounding requests, and separately, bigger goals keep losing ground to other genuinely good opportunities rather than to obviously bad distractions. That double pattern is what this combination answers. If the real problem is not knowing what the priorities even are yet, start with the 25/5 exercise alone; the daily-deferral habit has nothing to protect until there's something specific circled. It also fits better for someone with genuine day-to-day discretion over their own schedule — a founder, a freelancer, an individual contributor with real autonomy — than for someone whose calendar is largely set by other people's meetings, since both methods depend on there being a real decision to make about what goes on the list in the first place.

Where this does not apply

In a role where genuinely urgent items — a safety issue, a client emergency, anything with real same-day stakes — arrive with real frequency, treating every incoming item as deferrable to tomorrow misapplies the method; Do It Tomorrow was built for the routine flow of requests and ideas, not for the small subset of things that actually can't wait, and pretending otherwise creates real damage rather than protecting a plan. And the 25/5 avoid-list can tip into rigidity if held too literally — a goal that genuinely stops mattering, or a circled five that turns out to be wrong six months in, should get revisited deliberately, not defended forever on the grounds that revisiting priorities is itself a distraction.

What the evidence does and does not support

Implementation intentions — deciding in advance exactly what you'll do when a specific situation arises, which is the underlying mechanism behind deferring a new task to a fixed list rather than deciding fresh each time — have one of the more robust randomized-trial literatures in behavior-change research, showing consistent effects on follow-through across many domains. The 25/5 Rule's own components — constraint improving follow-through, and cognitive load limiting how many goals a person can pursue well — draw on real, if more observational, research about attention and goal conflict; the specific Buffett origin story is popular but not verified, and the exercise itself hasn't been tested as a named technique in controlled studies, which is worth knowing before repeating the anecdote as though it were a documented finding rather than a widely shared story. Nobody has studied running both together — deferring tasks daily while also maintaining a goal-level avoid list — as a combined system, so the claim that they reinforce each other is a mechanism argument, not a measured result.