Benjamin Franklin's journaling prompts
Benjamin Franklin opened each day by asking what good he would do, and closed it by asking what good he had done — his own words, written into the daily schedule he called the Scheme. This template keeps the morning question verbatim and asks the evening one the next morning, about yesterday.
The prompts Benjamin Franklin worked from
Franklin asked his second question at eight in the evening: 'What Good have I done to day?'. Steps only asks in the morning, so here it looks back at yesterday instead. That is a real change and it costs something — Franklin was settling a day he could still remember hour by hour, where you are settling one a night's sleep away. What it gains is distance: yesterday is finished, and easier to be honest about than an evening still going on.
- What good shall I do this day? Franklin's own words, from the five o'clock line of the Scheme. Capitalisation modernised; nothing else touched.
- What good did you do yesterday? Franklin's eight o'clock question, moved to the morning and turned to look back a day. See the note above the prompts.
What he actually did
In Part 2 of the Autobiography, Franklin prints his daily timetable — the Scheme. It runs hour by hour, and two of its lines are questions he asked himself.
At five in the morning: What good shall I do this day?
At eight at night: What Good have I done to day?
They are not rhetorical. They bracket the working day, and they sit alongside the thirteen virtues and the chart he marked each night — the part of the practice most people remember, and the part he was least successful at keeping.
The honest part
Franklin gave up on the Scheme. He says so plainly: the order it demanded might be practicable for a journeyman printer, but not for a man who had to receive people of business at their own hours. He kept the questions and lost the timetable.
That is worth knowing before you start. The questions are the durable half.
What we changed
Steps asks in the morning only, so the evening question here looks back at yesterday rather than at the day just ending. Franklin had the day fresh; you have it finished. He was settling accounts he could still feel; you are reading them a night later, which is harder to fudge and easier to be fair about.
If you want his version, ask the second one at eight at night, on paper, the way he did.
Try these prompts in Steps, free for 30 days — or, if you already have Steps, paste this page's link into your thread and Steps sets them up for you.
People who want a day to have a shape — something declared at the start and accounted for at the end — and who would rather answer a plain question than write freely about how things went.
It is a ledger, and ledgers can turn into scorekeeping. Franklin himself gave up on the timetable, admitting the Scheme suited a journeyman printer more than a man who had to meet people at their hours. If asking what good you did starts producing a list of failures rather than a record of a day, this practice has stopped working and it is worth stopping too.
Franklin sets out the practice in Part 2 of his Autobiography, inside the daily timetable he called the Scheme. The morning question sits at five o'clock and the evening question at eight, printed in the table itself — these are his sentences, not a later summary of them.
Curated by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
