Weight, Not Length: A Better Pros and Cons List

Ben Franklin is often credited with the modern pros-and-cons list — a simple ledger of reasons for and against, scored by length. More pros than cons? Do it. More cons than pros? Don't.

Franklin was smarter than that. His actual method weighted each reason and canceled them in pairs. The simplified version people borrowed from him — the one most of us still use — drops the weights. And without the weights, the list is worse than no list at all.

Why Length Misleads

Unweighted lists reward whoever can brainstorm the longest. The person who can think of seven small upsides to a decision will outvote the person who's named two serious downsides — even if those two downsides would be genuinely ruinous.

This happens all the time in real decisions. Consider moving cities for a job:

Pros: better pay, better weather, newer apartment, shorter commute, nicer gym, closer to the airport, more restaurants.
Cons: further from aging parents, losing lifelong friendships.

Seven to two. The list says move. But one weight-7 reason — "I'd be five hours away from my mom in her last decade" — should not be outweighed by six weight-1 conveniences. The math of an unweighted list pretends it does.

How Weights Fix It

Assign each reason an importance score — something like 1 (trivial) through 7 (decisive). Then add up the weights on each side instead of counting entries.

In the example above, the pros might total around 11 weight points (a few 2s, a few 1s, and a 3). The two cons might total 13 (a 7 and a 6). Now it's a real debate, not a foregone conclusion.

A good decision tool makes the important things loud. An unweighted list only makes the numerous things loud.

Picking the Weights Honestly

People often under-weight the things that scare them most — either because the reason feels too big to quantify, or because they don't want to admit it's driving the decision. Watch for items you'd rate a 7 but feel tempted to write down as a 4 to "be fair." That asymmetry is usually your gut trying to avoid the answer it already knows.

The weights don't need to be precise. They just need to be honest. A list of twelve reasons with honest 1-to-7 weights will almost always point you in a clearer direction than a list of twenty with no weights at all.