Sometimes all you need is a nudge.
Ben Franklin had 13 virtues that he tried to practice in his life. All of them seem great to me 1 so I thought I could emulate him and try to incorporate them in my life.
Ben kept a checklist and tried to hold himself to concentrating on one virtue a week. If he messed up, he would make a tick next to that virtue. He had a system, using the best technology of his day.
Here is my version: franklin.rb
That’s a format called YAML that is easy for both people and machines to read and I’ve created a list of the virtues in YAML. I’ve also made a little something called franklin.rb to read that list of virtues every day, pick one, then pop it into my google calendar every day at 6 AM 2 .
So every day for the past year or so, I’ve been getting a little nudge from one of the greats. I think it has been good for me – I find that morning nudge focuses me for the day on that virtue. Here’s how you can do the same.
- Download the files and put them in a directory on your computer 3 . Use a text editor and open config.yml, then fill in your google calendar details. 4
- Set up a cron job to call the script every morning.
Of course, you don’t need to use Franklin’s 13 virtues. You could put in the 10 commandments, the 8 fold path, or a list of excercise routines. Do me a favor, though. If you improve franklin.rb or come up with a new list of virtues, please let me know so I can share with other folks.
Update: I’ve set up a google calendar for you to use.
- Well, I’m not a fan of chastity, but I also know the great founding horndog himself didn’t pay much more than lip service to it. (back)
- I can’t ask Ben to get up earlier than I do. (back)
- I run it on this webserver actually. You have gone and bought yourself some ridiculously cheap hosting, right? Good – I’m glad you’ve got your own cloud (back)
- What else? This is a Ruby script, so you’ll need that and ruby’s rubygems package management system. When you have both installed please also
gem install googlecalendar
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
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