franklin-decision-ledger
Run a hard two-option decision through Benjamin Franklin's 'moral or prudential algebra' — the weighted pro/con method he described to Joseph Priestley in 1772 — including the part everyone skips: striking out reasons that cancel, and letting the ledger sit before deciding. Use when weighing job offers, relocations, build-vs-buy, take-the-promotion, shut-it-down decisions, or any 'I keep going back and forth'. Produces a completed decision ledger with a leaning, its strongest counter, and a revisit date.
Profile →npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill franklin-decision-ledger --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Franklin Decision Ledger Skill In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Franklin laid out why hard decisions feel impossible: the reasons for and against are never "present to the mind at the same time" — whichever set you thought about most recently feels decisive. His fix, which he called **moral or prudential algebra**, is a ledger kept over days, with weights, where reasons of equal weight are struck out in pairs until one column visibly outweighs. This skill runs the full method — not the flattened pros-and-cons list it degenerated into. ## What This Skill Produces - A two-column **decision ledger** with every motive the user can surface, weighted - The **cancellation pass**: equal weights struck out in pairs, remainder shown - The **leaning** the algebra produces, its strongest surviving counter-reason, and what evidence would flip it - A **sit-on-it plan**: what to add to the ledger over the next 1–2 days before committing (Franklin's "farther consideration" step) ## Required Inputs Ask for (if not already provided): - The two options, stated as the user would say them (if there are three, split the decision or run twice — the algebra is pairwise) - Everything currently pulli
- What This Skill Produces
- Required Inputs
- Framework: the algebra, as Franklin described it
- Output Format
- Quality Checks
- Anti-Patterns
- Related
What does the franklin-decision-ledger skill do?
Run a hard two-option decision through Benjamin Franklin's 'moral or prudential algebra' — the weighted pro/con method he described to Joseph Priestley in 1772 — including the part everyone skips: striking out reasons that cancel, and letting the ledger sit before deciding. Use when weighing job offers, relocations, build-vs-buy, take-the-promotion, shut-it-down decisions, or any 'I keep going back and forth'. Produces a completed decision ledger with a leaning, its strongest counter, and a revisit date.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill franklin-decision-ledger --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills, a repository with 1,255 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.