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For a time I considered actually trying to invent something. I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of creating something new. Fascination, however, does not equal creation. The truth is that I am simply not my grandfather or Benjamin Franklin. If I was going to be original, I would need to look a little closer to home. The appeal manual was in the right ballpark but not quite, well, inventive enough. I needed something new, original, beneficial, and industrious. I needed to do something no one else had done.

One of the most time-consuming jobs for police and prosecutors is obtaining a search warrant. It is, of course, essential, both in a practical sense and constitutionally. No one, certain exceptions aside, should have his or her privacy invaded unless a judge agrees beforehand. The process is, however, laborious and frustrating. First, we expect police officers to draft documents that will stand up to judicial scrutiny despite the fact that they generally have little, if any, legal training. Second, we expect them to draft the documents requesting a warrant in the dynamic environment of a criminal investigation. Prosecutors help, but the real burden falls on the police. This was the perfect opportunity for an “invention.” This, I reasoned, was more like Ben (and Big Haze): industrious.

I started planning a database for the preparation of warrants. It would automate the type of advice that I offer to police on a daily basis and help replicate the tombstone data that must be repeated in the affidavits used in warrant applications. I had visions of keystroke-saving measures, data replication, alerts when deadlines neared. It would be glorious. It would be inventive. It would be industrious.

It would be . . . a long process.

I quickly realized that I was not going to finish this project in a day, or a week, or a month. I contacted some friends in the IT field, and we came up with some relatively unsophisticated templates, which made it clear that this was a project that would require a long-term commitment. At this point, my desire to be industrious ran headlong into my terribly short attention span. If Industry takes more than twenty minutes, I am in trouble; twenty minutes is my “sit still” limit. I once heard someone suggest that conversations have a twenty-minute life span. That is, every conversation has a lull or pause or dead spot approximately every twenty minutes. It seems also to apply to my working life. Absent some external restriction, I have to rise and take a short walk every twenty minutes.

On another day, that might have been the end of my warrant preparation database. I might have chucked the whole idea and gone back to my slothful ways. But this week I was in the hands of Benjamin Franklin. This week I was dedicated to Industry. So despite my recognition of my twenty-minute attention span, I resolved that I would remain industrious. I resolved that every time I felt like getting up at the twenty-minute mark, I would remind myself that Ben insists we be always employed in something useful—not always except for twenty-minute stretch breaks. I knew I would not finish the warrant preparation software before the end of the week, but I also knew that I would not give up.

I think Ben was actually having some effect on me. By the end of the workweek, Ben’s virtue of Industry seemed to have helped. I had found that I was indeed more industrious that week. I had completed my appeal manual, made substantial inroads on my warrant data- { base, finalized arrangements for a golf trip, and furthered my plans for the pro bono charity.

{ It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.}

Okay, so I hadn’t invented an odometer, mapped the Gulf Stream, or created the armonica (all things, you might have guessed, done or invented by Ben Franklin . . . and yes, again, there is no h . . . I don’t think Franklin had anything to do with the harmonica). I had, however, been