Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues and Daily Routine

Published October 22, 2026

Benjamin Franklin kept what may be the first modern habit tracker: a weekly chart of thirteen virtues, marked with a black dot for each fault, reviewed every evening. His daily routine, built around morning and evening reflection questions and a fixed work schedule, was documented in his Autobiography — written decades later as both record and instruction, with the honest admission that he often fell short of his own plan.

This is his routine at its most structured period (mid-1730s, Philadelphia, running his printing business), the virtue system that accompanied it, and what habit research says about the mechanisms that made it work.

Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule at a glance

Franklin described his “scheme of employment for the twenty-four hours of a natural day” in his Autobiography. The schedule below is drawn directly from that source, with his own words where exact times are given.¹

Time	Activity	Source	Grade
5:00–8:00 AM	Rise, wash, “address Powerful Goodness”; plan the day’s business and “take the resolution of the day”; prosecute the present study; breakfast	Autobiography, section 38	A
8:00 AM–12:00 PM	Work	Autobiography, section 38	A
12:00–2:00 PM	Read or overlook accounts, and dine	Autobiography, section 38	A
2:00–6:00 PM	Work	Autobiography, section 38	A
6:00–10:00 PM	Put things in their places; supper; music, diversion, or conversation; “examination of the day”	Autobiography, section 38	A
10:00 PM–5:00 AM	Sleep	Autobiography, section 38	A

Evidence grade A: Franklin’s own written account, public domain, multiple editions available through Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, and the Founders Online collection maintained by the National Archives.

What time did Benjamin Franklin wake up? 5:00 AM, according to the schedule he laid out. He allowed three morning hours before the work day began at eight.

What time did he go to bed? 10:00 PM, giving him seven hours of sleep. This was the plan; he notes in the same section that he did not always keep to it.

The morning question: “What good shall I do this day?”

Each morning, between rising and breakfast, Franklin asked himself a planning question he had written into his schedule: “What good shall I do this day?”¹

This was not ornamental. It was a daily prompt to set the day’s resolutions, positioned immediately after washing and a short prayer he called “address[ing] Powerful Goodness.” The question appears in the printed chart Franklin included in his Autobiography, inside the block marked 5:00 to 8:00 AM.

In habit-formation terms, this is a reflection ritual anchored to an existing routine. The trigger (waking, washing) was stable and unavoidable; the behaviour (asking the question and planning) followed it at the same place in the sequence each day. Philippa Lally’s work on habit formation emphasizes that pairing a new behaviour with a context-stable cue produces faster automaticity than attempting the behaviour at varying times.²

The evening question: “What good have I done to-day?”

Each evening, from 6:00 to 10:00 PM, Franklin set aside time for an “examination of the day.”¹ The chart includes the counterpart question: “What good have I done to-day?”

He performed this examination alongside his virtue chart review (see below), marking the day’s faults. It was both an accounting and a closing ritual, occupying the same evening block every day. That consistency is what habit research describes as a stable cue: the end of the work day and the beginning of the evening routine prompted the review without requiring a separate decision.

The structure — a matching pair of morning and evening questions — creates a daily learning cycle. The morning question sets intent. The evening question closes the loop with evidence. This is the pattern Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger describe as cue-dependent repetition: the situation (morning or evening) reliably prompts the behaviour (reflection), and repetition in a stable context builds automaticity.³

The 13 virtues and Franklin’s habit tracker

Franklin’s best-known habit system was a chart of thirteen virtues, introduced in his Autobiography as a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.”⁴ He listed the virtues, defined each one in a short rule, and tracked his adherence in a weekly grid.

The thirteen virtues

Franklin’s list, with his own definitions (slightly modernized for clarity):⁴

Temperance: Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself — that is, waste nothing.
Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquillity: Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

He did not attempt all thirteen at once. Instead, he gave “strict attention” to one virtue per week, proceeding through all thirteen over a quarter (thirteen weeks), then repeating the cycle. He aimed to complete four courses per year, which meant spending roughly a week with each virtue four times annually.⁴

Franklin’s weekly virtue chart explained

Franklin carried a small book with a page for each virtue. Each page had seven columns (one per day of the week) and thirteen rows (one per virtue). At the end of each day, during his evening examination, he marked a small black dot for every fault he committed against any of the virtues.⁴

He kept the week’s focus virtue at the top of his attention, but he recorded faults for all of them. Over time, as one virtue improved and its row stayed clearer, he could see the progress and shift his energy to the next.

Here is a simplified reconstruction of what one week in Franklin’s chart looked like (this example is illustrative; the Autobiography describes the structure but does not reproduce a filled week):

Virtue	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
Temperance ← focus	·		·
Silence		·			·
Order	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Resolution							·
Frugality
Industry		·
Sincerity
Justice
Moderation
Cleanliness
Tranquillity		·
Chastity
Humility	·		·				·

Each dot represented a fault. A clear day was a success. Franklin admitted that Order — “let all your things have their places” — gave him the most trouble and remained imperfectly mastered throughout his life.⁴ His chart, if we had it, would likely show that row more densely marked than the others.

This is a habit tracker. The mechanism is the same one used in any modern completion log: daily repetition, visible progress, and a record that survives the gaps. Franklin marked faults; a modern tracker marks completions. The principle is identical.

One virtue at a time: the weekly focus

The weekly rotation through the virtues follows a straightforward principle: attempting one behaviour change at a time is simpler than attempting many simultaneously. Franklin knew he could not hold all thirteen in working memory at once. By committing to strict attention on one virtue per week, he reduced the cognitive load. The others were still tracked, but the learning effort was concentrated.

This aligns with Lally’s 2010 study on habit formation, where participants took up one new daily behaviour, reaching a plateau of automaticity after a median of 66 days — about nine weeks.² Simplicity and singular focus shortened the path to automaticity. Pick one small habit, track it daily, and when it runs without negotiation (six to ten weeks), add the next one.

What habit research says about Franklin’s system

Franklin’s method anticipated several findings from later habit science:

Context-stable cues produce automaticity faster

Franklin anchored his daily review to a fixed time and situation: evening, after work, before bed. His morning planning followed waking and washing. These are what Lally and colleagues call context cues — situations that recur daily and reliably prompt the behaviour.² A behaviour performed at the same time and place accumulates more effective repetitions than one attempted at varying times. The association between situation and behaviour is the mechanism of habit formation.

Tracking creates accountability and reveals patterns

Franklin’s chart gave him a record of where he stood and a reason to check in daily. Tracking removes the ambiguity about whether you are doing the thing and turns invisible effort into visible progress.

Modern habit trackers work the same way. The free web habit tracker assigns each habit a strength score from 0 to 100 and maps it to formation stages (Starting → Developing → Building → Strong → Established → Mastering). Franklin marked faults with a dot; the tracker marks completions and lets the score show the trend.

One behaviour at a time, repeated in a stable context

Franklin’s weekly virtue focus aligns with what Wood and Rünger describe as the two necessary conditions for habit formation: repetition and context stability.³ A behaviour performed daily, in the same situation, after the same cue, becomes automatic. One attempted at varying times does not.

Franklin gave himself thirteen weeks per cycle. Modern research suggests that for many behaviours, sixty to seventy days of daily repetition brings the action close to automaticity.² His method of returning to each virtue four times a year provided continued reinforcement.

Missing once does not erase progress

Franklin admitted he fell short. The virtue of Order, he wrote, “gave me the most trouble,” and though he made some progress, he never fully mastered it. His chart would have shown many marks in that row — but he kept going.⁴

Lally’s study found that missing a single day did not disrupt the overall trend of habit formation.² The participants who reached automaticity did so despite occasional misses. Franklin’s system, by requiring a daily mark (even if that mark was a fault), kept him returning to the chart. One missed virtue on a Tuesday did not erase the progress from the previous weeks; it was simply a dot, recorded and moved past.

Try one of Franklin’s habits today

Start with one behaviour, smaller than feels significant:

Morning planning: Write one sentence answering “What matters most today?” after making coffee or finishing breakfast.
Evening review: Each night, write one sentence answering “What went well today?” Position it after dinner or before brushing your teeth.
One virtue as a daily check: Pick one of Franklin’s virtues (Silence, Order, Frugality, Tranquility) and track it as a yes-or-no daily habit for a week.

The Ring Habits tracker runs entirely in the browser with no account required and calculates a 0–100 habit strength score for each behaviour. As you build consistency, the score moves you through stages from Starting to Mastering. The Ring Habits iPhone app supports weekly and monthly schedules with notification reminders.

Myths and unverified claims

Claim	Status	Source
Franklin invented the habit tracker	Overstated. He described a personal tracking system in his Autobiography, and it is one of the earliest documented examples of a structured self-improvement chart, but earlier forms of personal record-keeping existed.	The claim appears in modern habit literature but is not made by Franklin himself.
The “insanity” quote (“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over…”)	Misattributed to Franklin (and also to Einstein). The earliest known matches are from 1981 Al-Anon literature. The Franklin attribution is modern and unsourced.	Quote Investigator,⁵ which traces the quote’s history in detail.
Franklin followed this schedule rigidly for his entire adult life	Unsupported. The schedule appears in the Autobiography, written retrospectively, and Franklin himself admits he often failed to keep to it, particularly the virtue of Order.	Autobiography, section 37.⁴ He describes it as an aspiration and a plan, not a log of what he did every day.

Sources

All sources were last accessed on October 22, 2026.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Public domain. Available through Wikisource, Section 38 (daily schedule) and Standard Ebooks, Chapter IX.
Lally, Phillippa, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle. “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world.” European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
Wood, Wendy, and Dennis Rünger. “Psychology of Habit.” Annual Review of Psychology 67 (2016): 289–314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Public domain. Available through Wikisource, Section 37 (thirteen virtues and chart).
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Quote Investigator. March 23, 2017. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/

Franklin, Autobiography, Wikisource Section 38 (daily schedule). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Lally et al., “How are habits formed” (2010), European Journal of Social Psychology. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Wood & Rünger, “Psychology of Habit” (2016), Annual Review of Psychology. ↩ ↩²
Franklin, Autobiography, Wikisource Section 37 (thirteen virtues). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Quote Investigator, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over…” (March 2017). ↩