Warren Buffett's
25/5 Rule
You want to do it all this year. You start learning a language, pick up running, and sign up for an evening course. Six months in, you've made a little progress on each and finished none of them.
What is Warren Buffett's 25/5 Rule?
Warren Buffett's 25/5 Rule is a prioritization tool that forces you to focus on a few goals by treating the rest as distractions to avoid. You write down your top 25 goals, circle the five that matter most, and commit your time to those five. The other 20 become an avoid-at-all-costs list rather than a someday list. The rule is popularly attributed to Warren Buffett, and its sharp instruction about the leftover 20 is what makes it useful.
The trick sits in how you treat those 20 goals. They're dangerous precisely because they appeal to you. They're real things you genuinely want, so they tug at your weekends and your attention, and they quietly starve the five goals that matter most. Calling them "avoid for now" instead of "I'll get to these later" keeps them from stealing the time your five need, because a goal labeled "later" still feels open to dabble in this afternoon.
How to use it
Run your ambitions through five steps. Honesty about what you'll set aside is the part that does the work.
- Write down your top 25 goals.
Pull from every part of your life: health, money, learning, relationships, projects. Get the list to 25. - Circle the five most important.
Choose the five you'd keep if you could pursue only five. Take your time with this. - Separate the two lists clearly.
The five are your plan. The other 20 go on a distinct, named list of their own. - Treat the 20 as an avoid list, not a later list.
Decide that you will not work on them for now, because every hour spent there is an hour taken from your five. - Pour your time and energy into the five.
Stay on them until you've made real progress, then revisit the full list.
Worked example
You sit down in January and list 25 things you want this year: get fit, read more, learn Spanish, redecorate the flat, save for a deposit, see more of your family, take up baking, and so on down to 25. Then you force yourself to circle just five: save for the deposit, get fit, see your family more often, read more, and learn Spanish. The other 20, including the redecorating and the baking, go on a separate list.
The hard part is what you do with that second list. Instead of telling yourself you'll get to redecorating when you have a spare weekend, you treat it as off-limits for now, because every weekend spent painting walls is a weekend not spent on your five. By December you've saved a real deposit, built a fitness habit, seen your family often, read a stack of books, and held basic conversations in Spanish. You made genuine progress on five goals rather than dabbling in twenty-five.