Product Overview
This little book is a daily planner based on the one mentioned in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Its goal is to help you order your day to achieve the highest degree of industry, justice (for justice means right ordering), and peace (which follows justice).
It will not do this spontaneously however, and even Benjamin Franklin admitted that he usually failed to order his day ideally due to the unpredictability of his life. But it can help. The layout is simple and straightforward, helpful and conformable to your needs, and includes a short guide to get you off your feet.
Includes enough pages for half of a year (26 weeks). Since the daily planning sheets are not tied to any particular date, month, or year you can start using it whenever you like (unlike most yearly planners).
From the Introduction: This book is chiefly the manifestation of the author's own lack of order, a virtue that it so often wanting in our times. As a remedy I tried many things such as lists, goals, or (most often) memory, but these were found to lack consistency and constancy. It was then that I recalled Benjamin Franklin's little virtue book as contained in his Autobiography. This book, which he created on his own printing presses, contained a small chart by which he could track his daily infractions of thirteen different virtues in hopes of achieving moral perfection (a goal which, as you might guess, he failed to achieve). The third virtue on the chart was `Order' which he defined as: ``Let all things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.'' To assist his achievement of Order he created a simple chart by which to outline the business of the day, which he discusses in these lines: ``The precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allotted time, my little book contain'd the following scheme of employment for the twenty-four hours of a natural day.'' He then proceeds to present a simple chart whereby he splits the day into twenty-four hours, four time periods, and two questions. The hours he displays in a line, leaving space for tasks such as `Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness!' or, simply, `Work', to be printed next to them. The day he splits into four parts: `The Morning', `Noon', `Evening', and `Night.' The two questions he gives are `What good shall I do this day?' in the Morning and `What good have I done to-day?' for the Evening. Each of these three parameters he uses to frame his daily tasks and to `Contrive the day's business' at the start of the day and to create a `Examination of the day' at the close. I therefore set out to create this little book modeling it after the chart for `Order' in hopes of improving my own and have published it here (and at a reasonable price and small size) in hopes that it may help others who may chance to find it. Yet lest anyone who takes it up despair in their continual shortcomings, let Benjamin Franklin's own words concerning it suffice: ``My scheme of Order gave me the most trouble; and...this article, therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt...But on the whole, tho' I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and happier man that I otherwise would have been if I had not attempted it.''
