If you want to know how to be more disciplined and consistent, cut decisions before you add willpower. Franklin planned his day in six time blocks around two questions — what good shall I do this day, and what good have I done today — and still admitted he never mastered the virtue of order.
You have seen the chart. Six blocks. Up at five, in bed by ten, the day bookended by two questions written in his own hand:
“What good shall I do this day?” in the morning.
“What good have I done today?” at night.
It is genuinely one of the best productivity systems ever designed, and it is roughly three hundred years old. It is also a system its inventor publicly failed at, which is the part worth your attention.
The actual schedule
Franklin laid it out in his autobiography, and the striking thing is how little is in it.
5–7 AM. Rise, wash, and “address Powerful Goodness.” Plan the day. Take the resolution of the day. Study. Breakfast.
8 AM – 12 PM. Work.
12–2 PM. Read, or look over his accounts, and eat.
2–6 PM. Work.
6–10 PM. Put things in their places. Supper. Music, diversion, conversation. Examine the day.
10 PM – 5 AM. Sleep.
Six blocks. One of which is sleeping. Seven hours of it, which is worth noting given how many people invoke Franklin while bragging about four.
Compare that to your calendar today. Franklin ran a printing empire, a postal service, a scientific career and a revolution on a schedule with less granularity than most people’s Tuesday.
The two questions are the whole system
Strip away the timings and what remains is a loop:
In the morning, commit to something specific. In the evening, check whether you did it. Repeat tomorrow with that information.
That is it. That is the entire mechanism, and it is better than almost everything sold as productivity software since.
Note the wording, because it is doing work. Not “what will I get done” — a task question, which you can satisfy by clearing your inbox and achieving nothing. What good shall I do. A value question. It forces you to name something that would actually matter by the evening.
And the evening question is not a gentle reflection prompt. It is an audit. He is checking his own answer from twelve hours earlier, and there are only two possible results.
The steal: tonight, before bed, write one sentence answering “what good have I done today?” Tomorrow morning, write one answering “what good shall I do this day?” That is the whole system. It takes ninety seconds and it will be uncomfortable within three days, which is how you know it is working.
The air baths, since you will ask
Franklin also sat naked in front of an open window most mornings, for up to an hour, reading or writing. He called it a “tonic bath” and thought cold air on bare skin was healthier than cold water.
I am not going to build a productivity lesson out of this. He was an eighteenth-century man with eighteenth-century medical opinions and he was almost certainly wrong.
But it does tell you something about him: he was willing to look ridiculous in private if he thought it worked. Most people are not. That is a real trait, and it is more transferable than the schedule.
The thirteen virtues, and the honest ending
Alongside the schedule, Franklin ran a second system: thirteen virtues, tracked on a grid, one focused on per week, thirteen weeks a cycle, four cycles a year at first. Later he ran one course a year, then one every few years, and eventually stopped.
Temperance. Silence. Order. Resolution. Frugality. Industry. Sincerity. Justice. Moderation. Cleanliness. Tranquillity. Chastity. Humility.
He marked a black dot on the chart every time he failed one. The goal was a clean page.
He never got a clean page.
And in the autobiography he singles out one virtue in particular as the one that defeated him: Order. The scheduling one. The one on the famous graphic. He wrote that he was constantly frustrated by his failure at it, that his memory for where he put things was poor, and that he eventually more or less made peace with being bad at it.
His conclusion is the most useful line in the whole book: he ended up a better man for the attempt than he would have been without it, even though he never arrived.
What this actually means for you
The Franklin schedule graphic gets shared as an ideal to hit. It was never that. It was a target its own author never fully hit, and he wrote that he was a better man for the attempt.
Which means the failure mode everyone has — start the system, break it by Thursday, quit in shame — is not a failure of the system. It is the system. Franklin broke his constantly. He just did not treat breaking it as a reason to stop.
How to be more disciplined and consistent: the three-line version
- Two questions, morning and night. What good shall I do. What good have I done. Ninety seconds total.
- Six blocks, not sixty. If your plan has more moving parts than Franklin’s, your plan is worse than Franklin’s.
- Expect to fail at it. He did, on the exact virtue the schedule is famous for, and said he was better for trying.
Frequently asked questions
Are discipline and consistency the same thing?
No. Discipline is doing the thing when you would rather not; consistency is doing it repeatedly over time. Discipline gets you through one hard day, but consistency comes mostly from structure — fixed times, fewer decisions, a small daily target — which is why Franklin’s schedule mattered more than his willpower.
How do I become disciplined and consistent?
Reduce the number of daily decisions, fix one or two anchors in the day, and review yourself briefly every evening. Franklin’s pair of questions — what good shall I do today, what good have I done — is a ninety-second version of that review that still works.
How long does it take to become more disciplined?
Longer than the popular 21-day claim, which has no solid basis. Expect weeks before a routine feels automatic, and judge progress on whether you kept the routine, not on how motivated you felt. Franklin’s own virtue courses went from four a year to none, and he still counted the attempt as worthwhile.
Sources
More on this: How to Be More Disciplined
This is what I do here: take someone from history, find what is actually documented about how they worked, strip out the myth that has grown over it, and work out what transfers. More of them in the routines collection.
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More like this: Napoleon’s daily routine · Churchill worked from bed · Darwin’s clockwork day