or at least his publishing house

because he had died a year prior,

published his autobiography.

And in that autobiography

Franklin actually laid out his daily schedule.

Now you may have seen a picture of this schedule

online before but what I wanna do in this video

is actually go through the schedule

and see what we can learn from it,

both in terms of what's useful in the schedule

and what it might actually be missing

that you should have in yours.

Let's get into it.

Alright, so first things first,

at least according to this schedule,

he woke up at 5 am every single morning.

Which means that he definitely lived up to his early to bed

early to rise mantra.

And this is the first thing I wanna get into

because as I talked about in my video

about how to wake up early

you don't actually need to wake up early to be successful.

This is something that Ben Franklin definitely advocated

but there are many different people throughout the world

who have been successful even if they wake up at 8 am,

10 am, or whatever hour that they feel like

because we are all different.

In fact, people have different chronotypes

which are essentially biologically set times

at which they tend to go to bed and get up.

So figure out what yours is and live by that

not just some schedule from a dude who lived 300 years ago.

So the first real item of business on this schedule

is the morning question.

What good shall I do this day?

And this is setting an intention

and I think it's a great habit to adopt in your own life

because setting an intention

allows you to give yourself direction for the day

and when those urgent tasks or distractions

come up later in the day

you're gonna be able to keep you eye on the prize

and avoid them.

After he'd set that intention,

the next items which are rise, wash,

and address powerful goodness.

Which was his personal word for god.

And after that he would contrive the day's business

and take the resolution of the day.

Which is a big fancy, shmancy way of saying

make a daily plan.

So this is another great habit to start doing.

Setting the intention

gives you some direction for the day in a general sense

but sitting down and making a daily plan

allows you to make it more concrete.

You can break that big task, that big important work

down to the subtasks that are a lot easier to understand

and put into action.

And then you can order them so you know

exactly how you're going to tackle the day.

After making his daily schedule,

Franklin would prosecute the present study.

And that's some old English

that I didn't know how to interpret

but the popular interpretation

is that he's basically doing some studying

on whatever he's learning at the time.

And it's pretty safe to say that Franklin was a voracious,

life-long learner since according to Wikipedia

he was, among other things, an author, printer,

political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster,

scientist, inventor, civic activist,

statesman, and diplomat.

Now this is a part of his schedule that I really like

because it's something that I do myself.

I find it really helpful

to have some sort of learning project that I'm pursuing

independent of my work or a book that I'm reading

at basically all times.

And when I wake up in the morning after I brush my teeth

and feed my cat

I read every single day for about 20 or 30 minutes

before doing anything else.

And my friend Martin

does the same thing with language study.

He'll get up, he'll do some studying in Spanish or French,

and then get into the day's work.

So if you have an independent learning project

you now spend some time on that before you get into the work

that's gonna exhaust you

and deplete those willpower reserves

and if you don't, you should probably get one.

Next up we've got breakfast, which is breakfast.

I eat breakfast in the morning,

probably a pretty good thing to do,

and then we move into the main work block of the day.

And Franklin split this up into three different tasks.

First up there's a four-hour block of work

followed by a two-hour block for eating and reading

and going over accounts,

and then a final four-hour block of work.

And I have a few comments here.

So the first thing I wanna note here

is that because he mentioned in this noon segment

that he does some light reading or goes over accounts,

I interpret that as doing shallow work during his noon hour.

And if he's doing shallow work during the noon hour

then it stands to reason

that he's at least trying to do his deep,

highly-concentrated work during those two blocks of time.

So it's a good idea to try to schedule differences

between your intense work that's really important

and the work that doesn't require quite as much brain power

or quite as much attention.

Secondly, at least on his schedule,

Franklin did not make time for breaks

during his main work hours.

And this is something that you definitely want to do.

I made a whole video on why breaks are important.

So I'm sure that he probably did it in real life.

I mean, I can't go back in a time machine to verify,

but working for five hours at a time

without a break is pretty tough.

And you're gonna hit a point during that work session

where your efficiency is gonna go down.

So make sure you're taking some breaks,

going for walks, getting a little bit of exercise,

and breaking up those work sessions with some relaxation.

So once the work ends, the first thing that Franklin did

was to put things in their places.

Essentially put things away

and reset his space back to neutral.

Now this reminds me of a technique

a friend told me about a long time ago

which is called clearing to neutral.

Basically, you clear your workspace

back to its neutral clean, ready-to-go state

at the end of the day once you're done with your work.

And the reason you wanna do it then

rather than before you start the next day's work

is that it's a shallow task.

It's really easy to do,

it doesn't take a whole lot of willpower, and if you do it

then when you come into your work the next day

the workspace is ready to go

and you don't have to waste any time or willpower

getting the space ready.

You can just steamroll

right into the most challenging work of the day.

Once he had everything put away

the next things were supper, music,

diversion, and conversation.

And I'm sure that because life is complex even back then

he left a lot off the schedule so I do think it's telling

that he put this on the schedule.

That shows that he really did value time with friends

and relaxation and that he understood

the importance of taking breaks

and making time for recharging in between work sessions.

And that brings us to his last true activity of the day

besides sleep, which I'll get into in a second here,

and that is the asking of the question

what good have I done this day?

And asking that question, reflecting on the day's events

and what you've done is just as important

as setting the intention in the morning.

If you get yourself into the habit

of reflecting on what you've done during the day

then you can start to pinpoint what went right

and what went wrong.

And when you know what went wrong you can start to target

why it went wrong and then make changes

which will help you improve the next day.

Now he does have sleep written on his schedule

and he slept about seven hours a day

and the only real thing I have to say here

is that just because some dude 200 years ago

put seven hours of sleep on a schedule

doesn't mean that seven hours

is the optimal amount of sleep.

Everyone needs a different amount of sleep

so when you're creating your schedule

make sure you tailor it to the amount of sleep

that your body actually needs.

Remember, your sleep, your nutrition,

and your exercise are the levers

with which you can control your body's energy levels

and hence your ability to get work done.

So don't overlook them.

Alright, so to recap here

I wanna pull a few of the best lessons out of his schedule

that I found and share 'em here.

And I also wanna mention

a few of the things that were missing

that you should think about

when you're creating your own schedule.

First, I really like

how he tried to start every single day with purpose.

He set an intention for the day and he created a daily plan

to make sure that he carried it out.

I also like how he made specific time for shallow work.

He had those two work blocks

but then he would love over his accounts

and do easier stuff over the lunch hour.

And I also like how he made it a point to schedule time

for clearing his space to neutral,

getting everything cleaned up so that it was ready

for the next day's work.

Now a few things

I thought the schedule was missing include exercise,

taking small breaks during those work sessions,

and, through no fault of his own

since he lived 200 years ago,

a lot of the things that we have to deal with in life

like commuting to work or school, cooking, et cetera.

So when you're making your own schedule

take schedules like this

or schedules from other famous people you read online

as inspiration not as an exact recipe.

Take what's good, add it in, experiment with it,

and figure out what works for you.

Also if you find that you're not perfect

at following your schedule

realize that Ben Franklin wasn't perfect

at following his either.

In his autobiography right after he wrote out the schedule

Franklin wrote that, "I was surprised to find myself

"so fuller of faults than I had imagined;

"but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish."

So if you have one crappy day

or you have an interruption that comes up

that messes with your schedule just accept it,

forgive yourself, and then wake up the next day

and set that intention again.

And as time goes on,

because you deliberately built a schedule for yourself

you're gonna start building routines and habits

that will make these things happen less often

and in turn you'll be more successful.

So guys thanks for watching this video.

Hopefully you enjoyed it.

I'm gonna link to that schedule

down in the description below.

And if you liked this video give it a like

to support this channel and leave a comment down below