← Mind

Columns

Thirteen rows, seven days, one in focus
Franklin's page: thirteen named traits, one in focus per week, seven columns, a spot for every lapse. Thirteen weeks a cycle, four cycles a year. He never cleared the page, said so in print, and carried the book for the rest of his life.

The week

One virtue gets strict attention each week; the others you mark as they happen. Franklin's order is the default. Rename any of them to your own.

The page

A spot for every lapse, that day, on that line. Tap again to remove it. The week's marks are erasable; the weekly count below is not.

Weeks kept

The honest limit, stated first. Self monitoring is one of the better supported things in behavior change: across a hundred and thirty-eight randomized studies and nearly twenty thousand people, prompting someone to track progress toward a goal raised attainment by about four tenths of a standard deviation, and the effect was larger when the record was physical and larger again when somebody else saw it. That is the evidence under this page, and it is evidence for the tracking, not for the chart. Nobody has ever run a trial of a virtue chart. Virtues are not countable: a spot against Sincerity is a judgment, and the instrument reads your judgment of yourself, which is what Franklin found at the thirteenth line, where he added Humility because a friend told him he was thought proud, and then wrote that if he ever conquered it he would probably be proud of his humility. He never got a clean page. He gave up on Order as incorrigible, wore the paper through with scraping, moved to ivory, let the courses lapse to one a year and then to none, and kept the book anyway. His own verdict was that he fell far short and was a better and happier man for the attempt. The inflation belongs to the modern reprint that tracks all thirteen at once and to any page that tells you the unbroken streak is the point. This one counts weeks, not streaks.