Most people have too many goals. The Warren Buffett two list strategy fixes that.
The Warren Buffett two list strategy sounds simple: write down 25 goals, pick your top 5, then treat the remaining 20 as an active avoid list. The insight is sharper than it sounds – the real threat to your focus is not obvious time-wasters, but the goals that are genuinely good, just not the most important. This free tool walks you through the full exercise in about 10 minutes.
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 this tool actually solves
The problem is not that people lack ambition. Most driven people have more goals than they can realistically pursue in the next five years. The problem is that having 20 live goals feels productive while actually preventing progress on any of them. A list without elimination is just a wish list. This tool forces the one decision that most priority exercises skip entirely: not just which goals matter most, but which goals you are willing to walk away from right now.
The “avoid at all costs” label is deliberate. Buffett’s framework treats the 20 remaining goals not as lower priority, but as active competitors for your attention, energy, and time. Every hour you spend on goal 8 is an hour stolen from goal 3. The tool surfaces that tension by naming it plainly, then gives you a commitment prompt so the decision has real weight.
Three outputs come from a single session. Your Top 25 list captures everything you care about. Your Focus 5 becomes your filter for every decision about time and energy. Your Avoid list is the honest record of what you are choosing not to pursue, at least for now. Together, they replace a vague sense of priority with something you can actually act on.
Screenshot walkthrough
Here is the full flow of the tool, step by step. Each screenshot shows a real session with example goals so you know exactly what to expect before you start.
The three lists explained
Your Top 25 list
This is the honest inventory of everything you want to achieve. Most people underestimate how many things they are actually trying to pursue at once. Writing all 25 forces you to surface goals that are sitting half-acknowledged in the background pulling at your attention without ever making it onto a proper plan. The more things you list, the more valuable the exercise becomes. Aim for at least 15, but 25 is the real target.
Your Focus 5 list
These are the goals that survive the cut. Five is not arbitrary: it is small enough to represent a genuine commitment of time and energy, but broad enough to cover multiple areas of your life. Work, health, relationships, finances, and one personal project is a realistic Focus 5. If your top 5 all fall in one category, that tells you something important too. Once you have it, every decision about how to spend discretionary time runs through this list first.
Your Avoid-at-all-costs list
This is where the method does its real work. The 20 goals that did not make your top 5 are not harmless background noise. They are interesting, appealing, and sometimes urgent-feeling enough to steal time from your Focus 5 without you realising it. Buffett’s framing is that these goals are your biggest threat precisely because they are tempting. The tool prints only your Focus list for a reason: looking at the Avoid list invites renegotiation. Keep it out of sight.
The Warren Buffett two list strategy: theory and research
The story goes like this. Mike Flint, Warren Buffett’s personal pilot for ten years, asked Buffett for career advice. Buffett told him to write down his top 25 career goals. Then to circle his top 5. Then to look at the remaining 20. Flint said he would get to those after finishing the top 5. Buffett corrected him: everything not on your Focus 5 is your avoid list. Not a someday list. Not a when-I-have-time list. An active avoid list. Whether the exchange happened exactly this way is debated, but Buffett’s documented philosophy on focus is consistent with it throughout his public statements over decades.
The research behind the method is solid regardless of origin. Cognitive load theory, developed by psychologist John Sweller, shows that working memory has a fixed capacity. Holding 20 open goals creates genuine cognitive overhead that degrades performance on all of them. Studies on goal competition, including work by Moty Amar at Ono Academic College, show that people actively underperform on primary goals when secondary goals are mentally active. Wanting many things does not just slow you down, it measurably reduces your chances of achieving any of them. The two-list method works because it removes the secondary goals from active consideration, not just from your calendar.
The commitment prompt inside the tool adds a layer that pure list-making misses. Research on implementation intentions, pioneered by Peter Gollwitzer at NYU, shows that specifying what you will do and what you will ignore substantially increases follow-through compared to goal-setting alone. Writing down that you are choosing to ignore the Avoid list, not just postpone it, changes the psychological status of those goals. It is a small step with outsized effect on behaviour.
Who gets the most from this tool
People with too many half-started projects. If you have five tabs open in your life alongside five tabs open in your browser, this exercise surfaces exactly what is diluting your output. The tool makes visible what you already know but have been avoiding: you are trying to do too many things.
Anyone approaching a big transition. New job, post-degree, turning 30 or 40, returning from parental leave. Transition periods bring a surge of possibility thinking that can paralyse rather than motivate. Running the two-list exercise at a transition point sets a clear agenda for the next chapter rather than leaving it open-ended.
People who say yes to everything. If your schedule is full but your most important goals are stalling, the two-list method gives you a framework to decline requests that do not serve your Focus 5. “It is not in my top 5 right now” is a complete and honest reason to say no.
Teams doing roadmap or strategy work. Have each member run the exercise independently, then compare Focus 5 lists. Misalignment between team members’ top priorities tends to surface immediately. The conversation that follows is more useful than any alignment workshop because it is grounded in honest individual preferences, not group-approved language.
Related articles
These articles go deeper into the method and its context. Each one pairs directly with what the tool produces.
- Prioritization Methods Complete Guide – covers 12 frameworks including the two-list method, Eisenhower Matrix, and RICE scoring with practical comparisons
- Two-List Method: Warren Buffett’s Priority Decision System – a full breakdown of the method, the Flint story, common objections, and how to apply it across career, business, and personal contexts
- Personal Development Strategies Guide – puts the two-list method inside a broader framework for intentional growth, including how to review and update 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.
Can I run this exercise for a team or for business goals rather than personal ones?
Yes, and it tends to work well in that context. Have each team member complete the exercise independently before any group discussion. Then share Focus 5 lists and look for overlap and gaps. Items that appear on multiple people’s Focus 5 are clearly aligned priorities. Items that appear on some people’s Avoid lists while appearing on others’ Focus 5 reveal genuine strategic disagreement worth resolving explicitly. The resulting conversation is usually more honest and productive than standard alignment workshops.
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 people finish a goal-brainstorm feeling good. The list is tidy, ambitious, and comprehensive. The two-list exercise ends differently: you will look at 20 real goals you care about and commit to not pursuing them right now. That is supposed to feel uncomfortable. The discomfort is information. It tells you that the goals on your Avoid list were never harmless background items; they were quietly competing for the same attention and energy as your most important work.
The Focus 5 only does its job if the Avoid list is real. If you treat the 20 remaining goals as a someday list rather than an active avoid list, the exercise collapses back into a priority ranking with no teeth. Keep the print-out somewhere visible. Use the Focus 5 as your filter when new opportunities arrive. Revisit and rebuild quarterly, or whenever a Focus goal is genuinely complete. The method is simple. The follow-through is where it separates people who achieve their top goals from people who are perpetually working on all of them.
