When You Can't Decide
The tab has been open for three days. Take the job or keep the one you have. Move or stay. Sign or walk. You've talked it through with everyone, you've slept on it twice, and the answer still won't resolve — it just sloshes from one side to the other depending on the hour. You're not short on information. You're short on a way to hold it all still.
Benjamin Franklin knew the feeling, and in 1772 he wrote down a fix. His friend Joseph Priestley was agonizing over a decision, and Franklin replied that such cases are hard "chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time." His cure — he called it "Moral or Prudential Algebra" — was to stop trying to hold the whole thing in your head at once and get it onto paper.
The Method. Here is Franklin's own procedure, still sound two and a half centuries later, with the modern polish:
Split a page in two. One column Pro, one column Con — his exact instruction was "to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns."
Empty your head over several days. Don't do it in one sitting. As reasons occur to you across a few days, jot each under its column. The point is to catch the arguments that only surface at 2 a.m., the ones a single sitting misses.
Weigh each reason. Here's Franklin's real innovation: not every reason counts equally. Estimate the importance of each one — give it a rough weight (say, 1 to 5).
Cancel the offsetting pairs. When a Pro and a Con are roughly equal in weight, strike them both out. Where one Pro balances two Cons, cross out all three. Keep canceling equal weights across the line.
Read what survives. Whichever column has weight left standing is where the balance genuinely lies — you've turned a fog into arithmetic.
Two honest caveats the modern reader should keep. First, the weights are your judgment, not physics — the method organizes your thinking, it doesn't outsource it. Second, use it to check a gut feeling, not to overrule every one; on some decisions the ledger is best treated as a second opinion. Franklin himself pitched it as a way to avoid "a rash step," not to replace judgment.
The reasons weren't the problem — you just couldn't see them all at once. Franklin's whole trick was to make them hold still.