If you want to be more productive, you need to find someone who has mastered productivity. Financial blogs are constantly interviewing modern CEOs about their work habits, but they’re not all that inspiring; they always claim that meditation and not answering emails are the keys to success, which doesn’t really help the average person who doesn’t have the time or resources to meditate or the luxury of an assistant to open up their unanswered emails. For real inspiration, perhaps you should look back in time: Ivy Lee, the father of modern public relations, came up with a productivity method so good it’s been around for 100 years—and still bears his name. Here’s how to try it.

My dream in life is to do something so unique and awesome that my name is forever attached to it, but my short-term goals involve doing my basic tasks every day. Good old Ivy Lee somehow managed to do both. He came up with his productivity method in an effort to help large companies in the 1920s get more done. It’s all about creating manageable, prioritized to-do lists and sticking to them until they’re done.

The method itself is simple. At the end of each workday, write down six tasks that you need to accomplish tomorrow. (If it’s Friday, write down what you need to do Monday. Remember that taking breaks on the weekend is also important for productivity.) Write no more than six. The goal here is for the list to be manageable, not endless, so use your judgment to determine which six things are most important for the next day. Then prioritize them. You can do this however you like, but consider using a method like the Eisenhower Matrix to figure out which tasks are most immediate and urgent.

Writing out your to-do list by hand is helpful. You can do this in a digital note or doc, but writing it by hand really puts it in your head, so you might consider using an old-fashioned planner, like this one: