Franklin Dots

Est. on a method from 1726

A dot for every day
you fell short.

At twenty, Benjamin Franklin drew a small chart, wrote his commitments down one side and the days of the week across the top, and marked a dot whenever he failed to keep one. He carried that chart for the rest of his life and credited it, more than any talent, for whatever he made of himself.

This is that chart, for a month at a time. Keep it honestly and the page stays clean.

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“I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, after Joseph Siffred Duplessis, c. 1785
Benjamin Franklin, after Joseph Siffred Duplessis, c. 1785. Public domain.

The method

Mark the failures, not the wins.

Most trackers ask you to collect gold stars, which quietly rewards you for setting easy goals. Franklin’s chart does the opposite: a blank square is success, and every dot is a small debt you owe yourself. An honest week looks almost empty.

I
Write down what you mean to do
A handful of commitments in plain words — in bed by half past ten, thirty minutes of movement, no screens after supper. The editor suggests options with evidence behind them if you want a starting point.
II
Mark a dot when you fall short
One tap. Hovering shows you where the dot would land; pressing sets it down in ink.
III
Close the day with a tick
A tick at the head of each column records that you sat with the day and accounted for it. The ticks matter as much as the dots — they are the difference between a good week and a week you forgot to look at.
Form of the pages
TemperanceSMTWTFS
Temperance
Silence
Order
Resolution
Frugality
Industry
Sincerity
Justice
Moderation
Cleanliness
Tranquillity
Chastity
Humility
Franklin gave each virtue a week’s close attention and marked a dot for every lapse, aiming to keep the page clean.

Together

Share your growth with others

A commitment you have told someone about behaves differently from one you have only made to yourself. Research on goal pursuit finds the effect comes not from the promise but from the reporting: people who expect to show their record to someone whose opinion they value keep it far more faithfully than those who never report at all.

So the ledger can be shared. Send it to a friend, a partner, a training group, and their year appears beneath yours. Not a leaderboard and not a feed — just two pages side by side, which is enough. Most people find the weeks they would rather not show are precisely the weeks worth showing.

You decide how much is legible. Share the full page and they read your commitments as written. Share the marks alone and they see the shape of your month — the clean stretches and the ragged ones — with the wording kept to yourself. Either way you can withdraw it at any time, and nothing is ever shared by default.

Security

Your data is sealed, not merely stored.

A record of where you fall short every day is about as private as writing gets. It is treated that way here. Every commitment and every mark is encrypted with AES-256-GCM — the cipher approved by the NSA for information classified up to Top Secret — before it is written down anywhere.

Each account holds its own encryption key. That key is itself sealed by a hardware security module in AWS KMS, validated to FIPS 140-2 Level 3, and is never stored in readable form. A copy of the database on its own is a wall of ciphertext.

  • Encrypted in transit

    TLS 1.3 everywhere, with HSTS preloading so a browser will not even attempt an unencrypted connection.

  • Encrypted at rest, twice

    Each field is encrypted by the application before it reaches the database, which is then itself encrypted on disk.

  • Keys you can audit

    Every use of the master key is recorded in CloudTrail, and each key is bound to a single account so a stolen record cannot be unsealed against another.

  • Nothing to leak

    No advertising, no analytics, no third-party scripts of any kind. Your email address is stored encrypted and indexed only as a keyed hash.

  • Sealed sessions

    Your session cookie is encrypted rather than merely signed, and is locked to this origin.