Automated Virtue

Sometimes all you need is a nudge.
Ben FranklinBen 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.

  1. 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
  2. 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.

  1. 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)
  2. I can’t ask Ben to get up earlier than I do.   (back)
  3. 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)
  4. 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 

      (back)

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