Goals & Progress
Too many goals is the problem. The Warren Buffett two list strategy is the fix.
Write down 25 goals, pick your top 5, then treat the other 20 as a list to avoid until the five are done. That is the whole Warren Buffett two list strategy. The sharp part is that your biggest threat is not obvious time-wasters. It is the genuinely good goals that are not your most important ones. This free tool runs the full exercise in about ten minutes and hands you a focus list you can print or copy. For the story behind it and the case for why it works, see the full two-list method explainer.
Quickstart: type at least 15 goals into the tool below (up to 25), then hit “Choose My Top 5” to begin the elimination round. No signup needed. Your lists appear instantly and can be printed or copied.
List your goals, choose only 5, and discover the clarity that comes from knowing exactly what to ignore.
Write down everything you want to achieve in the next 1-5 years. Think across all areas of your life: career moves (get promoted, switch industries), financial targets (pay off debt, build savings), health goals (run a race, lose weight), skills to learn (new language, coding), relationship goals (more family time, mentorship), and personal projects (write a book, start a side business). The more honest and complete your list, the more powerful the exercise. Aim for 15-25 goals.
Which 5 goals matter most?
This is the hardest part. Every goal you do not select becomes something you actively avoid until these 5 are achieved.
My Top 5 — Focus List
Avoid at All Costs
Make It Official
What you walk away with
One session gives you three lists. Your Top 25 is the honest inventory of everything you are trying to do. Your Focus 5 is the short list that survives the cut, and it becomes the filter for how you spend your time. Your Avoid list is the record of what you are choosing not to pursue right now. A list without elimination is just a wish list. This tool forces the decision most priority exercises skip: not only which goals matter most, but which good ones you are willing to walk away from.
The “avoid at all costs” label is deliberate. The 20 goals that did not make your five are not lower priority sitting in the background. They are the appealing, urgent-feeling goals that steal hours from your Focus 5 without you noticing. That is why the tool prints only your Focus 5, and why it asks you to commit before you finish. Naming the trade-off is what gives the exercise teeth.
Screenshot walkthrough
Here is the full flow, step by step. Each screenshot shows a real session with example goals so you know exactly what to expect before you start.
How to use it well
List more than you think you should. Aim for at least 15 goals, but 25 is the real target. The more you write, the more half-acknowledged goals surface, and the harder and more useful the cut becomes. Then hold the hard limit at five. Five is small enough to be a genuine commitment and broad enough to span work, health, relationships, money, and one personal project. If all five land in one area, that tells you something worth noticing.
Keep the Avoid list out of sight. Looking at it is an invitation to renegotiate, and the whole method depends on those 20 goals staying off the table until your five are done. Print just your Focus 5, put it somewhere you will see it, and run new requests through it: if something does not move at least one of your five forward, the default answer is no. Revisit and rebuild quarterly, or whenever a Focus goal is genuinely complete.
Where the method comes from
The story is that Warren Buffett told his longtime pilot, Mike Flint, to write down 25 career goals, circle his top 5, and then treat the remaining 20 as an active avoid list, not a someday list. Whether the exchange happened exactly that way is debated, but it lines up with everything Buffett has said about focus over the years. The deeper case, including the psychology of why holding too many goals sabotages all of them, is covered in the full two-list method explainer. This page is the tool; that page is the why.
Who gets the most from this tool
People with too many half-started projects. If you have as many tabs open in your life as in your browser, this surfaces exactly what is diluting your output. It makes visible what you already suspect: you are trying to do too many things at once.
Anyone facing a big transition. A new job, finishing a degree, turning 30 or 40, returning from parental leave. Transitions flood you with possibility, which can paralyse as easily as motivate. Running the exercise at one of these moments sets a clear agenda for the next chapter instead of leaving it wide open.
People who say yes to everything. If your calendar is full but your most important goals keep stalling, the Focus 5 gives you a clean reason to decline. “It is not in my top 5 right now” is a complete and honest answer.
Related articles
These go deeper into the method and where it fits. Each one pairs directly with what the tool produces.
- Two-List Method: Warren Buffett’s Priority Decision System – the full breakdown of the method, the Flint story, the research, and common objections
- Prioritization Methods Complete Guide – 12 frameworks including the two-list method, the Eisenhower Matrix, and RICE scoring, with practical comparisons
- Personal Development Strategies Guide – puts the two-list method inside a broader plan for intentional growth and reviewing your priorities over time
Is the Warren Buffett two-list story actually true?
The Mike Flint story has been widely circulated but has never been confirmed by Buffett directly. Flint himself has not publicly verified it either. That said, the principle is completely consistent with everything Buffett has said publicly about focus over several decades. He has repeatedly described the ability to say no as the single most important skill for achieving anything significant. Whether or not the conversation happened exactly as described, the method reflects genuine Buffett philosophy.
Why exactly 5 goals and not 3 or 10?
Five is the number used in the original story and it happens to be a sensible constraint. Three is too few to cover different life domains without forcing awkward trade-offs between categories. Ten is too many to represent a real commitment. Five lets you hold one goal each across something like work, health, relationships, finances, and a personal project. The exact number matters less than the discipline of holding to a hard limit. If you genuinely feel five is wrong for your situation, try 7, but keep a hard cap.
What should I actually do with the Avoid list?
Close it. The printed output from this tool includes only your Focus 5 for a reason: looking at the Avoid list is an invitation to renegotiate. The method works precisely because the 20 goals on the Avoid list are genuinely appealing, that is why they were on your list in the first place. The commitment prompt inside the tool asks you to acknowledge that you are choosing to ignore the Avoid list until your Focus 5 are achieved, not postponing those goals, but actively setting them aside.
How long should I stick with the same Focus 5?
The traditional framing is to hold your Focus 5 until those goals are achieved, then rebuild. In practice, quarterly reviews work well for most people. Set a date in the tool’s review field when you finish the exercise, then treat that date as your scheduled check-in. During the commitment period, use your Focus 5 as a filter: if an opportunity does not advance at least one of your five, the default answer is no.
This feels too restrictive. What if I genuinely need more than 5 priorities?
That feeling is the exercise working correctly. The discomfort of cutting goals you care about is not a flaw in the method, it is the point. If everything feels equally important, you are not prioritising, you are listing. The two-list method forces the call that most goal-setting exercises skip. If you work through it and still feel the hard cap is genuinely wrong for your situation, that is useful information about your values and constraints that a softer exercise would never surface.
Is my data private and secure?
Yes. All information you enter stays in your local browser storage. Nothing is shared with, processed by, or saved on the Goals and Progress servers or any third-party provider. The trade-off is that clearing your browser cache will erase your data. Some tools include a save and load function so you can export your inputs as a local file and reload them later.
The hardest part is not the list, it is the cut
Most goal-brainstorms end with a tidy, ambitious list and a good feeling. This one ends differently. You will look at 20 real goals you care about and commit to not pursuing them right now, and that is supposed to feel uncomfortable. The discomfort is the information. It tells you those goals were never harmless background items. They were competing for the same attention as your most important work.
The Focus 5 only works if the Avoid list is real. Treat the other 20 as a someday list and the exercise collapses into a ranking with no teeth. Keep your printed Focus card visible, use it as your filter when new opportunities arrive, and rebuild quarterly or whenever a Focus goal is done. The method is simple. The follow-through is what separates people who finish their top goals from people who are perpetually working on all of them.
