Ben’s Virtues is an extremely minimalistic application that is supposed to encourage you to focus on thirteen virtues that are essential to living a good life. These virtues include temperance, sincerity, cleanliness, tranquility, etc. The idea is to reflect upon your day and record whether or not you transgressed or fulfilled the virtue of the week. That’s right, the virtue of the week. You don’t even have to focus on all thirteen virtues at once. Or do you?
Three out of the four pages in this app are explanations about what the virtues are, how Ben Franklin came up with the chart, and directions on how to fill out the chart. You only get to interact with one page, the actual virtue chart. The chart lists all the thirteen virtues on the left side with each day of the week at the top. At the end of each day, you need to decide whether or not you transgressed that week’s virtue, and if you did, place a dot in that box. For example, the first week’s virtue is temperance. So, at the end of each day for one week, you need reflect on your actions regarding temperance. If you drank or ate too much, then you’ve transgressed that virtue and need to place a dot in that day’s box. Dots are bad, while empty blue boxes are good. Next week, you don’t need to concentrate on temperance anymore, but instead, silence. After thirteen weeks, you can look back at your chart and see how many times you broke a virtue and focus on what virtues may be your weakness.
There are definitely a few problems with this application. First of all, unless you are really into self-reflection, who’s really going to remember to open this app every night and think about if you fulfilled a specific virtue or not? Also, why would you only need to focus on one virtue a week? Does that mean the first week, you can’t overeat, but you can the second week? Or, are you supposed to focus on one virtue the first week, then two virtues the second week? It’s not very clear, and the whole process just doesn’t make sense. I can better understand a daily diary entry that reflects upon your day’s accomplishments and strife. Ben’s Virtues just doesn’t cut it for me.
The app has no real bugs to speak of, except at times it is difficult to tap on a box to enter in the white dot. Maybe a solution would be to make larger squares, or to incorporate landscape mode.
If you’re really into self-reflection and you use other applications to critique your life, then this free app may actually be a nice supplement for you. However, for everybody else, it may just be a waste of time.
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