Everything that shapes a life sorts into four forces. Personality — who you are. Character — what you stand for. Resources — what you have. Well-Being — how you feel. They aren't a personality type or a quiz; they are four measurable rings that constantly pull on one another. 4 Rings fits this model to your life, one day at a time - until you can see, in plain numbers, which ring moves the others and exactly where to push next.
Built on a peer-reviewed, within-person model - fitted to one person. You.
Write the way you already think. 4 Rings turns daily reflection into both a quantitative model and a qualitative archive of your personality, character, resources, and well-being - fitted to one person. You.
Every entry is decomposed sentence by sentence. A private, on-device model (Google's Gemma 4) proposes scores. Nothing is saved until you validate.
A guided prompt or a blank page - the same plain prose you'd use in a notebook.
Gemma 4 runs entirely on your Mac, proposing scores across the four rings. No cloud, no account.
Click 1-5 to confirm or adjust. Only what you approve enters the dataset - traceable to its sentence.
4 Rings never makes a network call. No account, no cloud, no telemetry - the app runs fully offline, forever. Your journal is the most sensitive dataset you'll ever produce, and it lives on exactly one machine: yours.
Pull the WiFi out. The app keeps working. Gemma, your scores, your archive - all on-device.
Every entry, every score, every cell of the dataset is encrypted on disk using the Secure Enclave and a key derived from your passcode. Forget the passcode and the data is unreadable - even to us.
If you lose your passcode, the app falls back to your Apple ID - verified silently by macOS, never by us. You get back in. We still can't see your data. The failsafe is yours, not ours.
Move to a new Mac and your archive travels as a single encrypted bundle. It is never decrypted in transit, never staged on a server, never visible to anything but the destination machine, after your passcode unlocks it.
All scoring and summaries run through Google's Gemma 4, executed locally on your Mac. No OpenAI, no Anthropic, no cloud LLM - not in the trial, not ever. Every AI conversation is as private as the rest of the journal.
There is no sign-up, no login screen, no email collection. You download the app and start writing. There is nothing for us to leak, because we never had it.
Block the app at the macOS firewall - nothing breaks. Run any network monitor - you'll see zero outgoing traffic. The silence is the proof.
Decrypt and export your complete dataset as CSV with Stata code whenever you like. You own every number; you can verify every calculation; nothing is opaque.
Each ring drives the other three through measurable, citable relationships. Tap any ring to trace the directed effects - and the literature behind them.
4 Rings was designed for the people writing dissertations, theses, and journal articles. The app is the front-end. The dataset is the point.
Every entry you write produces a row in a publication-grade, N-of-1 dataset - four constructs, 61+ validated variables, daily averages, full provenance back to the originating sentence.
The data is entirely private - stored on your Mac, encrypted, and never transmitted. It is also entirely yours - exportable as CSV, with companion Stata code to run the structural equation model on your own machine.
The minimum dataset for statistically valid analysis is 75 days. After that, you have a within-person SEM you can defend in a viva, cite in a paper, or print as evidence of reflective practice.
| date | day | pers | char | res | wb | n_obs | purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-02-15 | 001 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.1 | 3.4 | 3 | 0.62 |
| 2026-02-16 | 002 | 3.9 | 4.0 | 3.1 | 3.5 | 2 | 0.64 |
| 2026-02-17 | 003 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 3.2 | 3.5 | 3 | 0.67 |
| 2026-02-18 | 004 | 4.0 | 4.2 | 3.3 | 3.7 | 4 | 0.71 |
| 2026-02-19 | 005 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 3.4 | 3.6 | 2 | 0.70 |
| 2026-02-20 | 006 | 4.0 | 4.3 | 3.4 | 3.8 | 3 | 0.74 |
| 2026-02-21 | 007 | 4.0 | 4.2 | 3.5 | 3.8 | 3 | 0.73 |
| … | … | … | … | … | … | … | … |
A real, fully-populated sample dataset - exported from the app - with the Stata code and schema to run the structural equation model yourself.
Inside 4 Rings, the Research tab includes a Download Data button that exports your full dataset and the matching Stata code - at any time, with no account, no API call, no friction.
Module leaders designing a curriculum. Students looking for a lifelong tool of self-knowledge. Faculty planning grants, projects, and publications.
Most MBAs and many undergraduate degrees already prescribe a Reflections Journal or Learning Journal. 4 Rings keeps that pedagogy - and turns it into a scored, quantitative dataset students can defend in a viva or print as evidence.
Self-knowledge is the foundation of every goal you will ever set. 4 Rings becomes a private dataset of who you are - growing with you through your degree, your career, your decades.
A research career is the long composition of small intellectual moves. 4 Rings is the planning surface for that career - with the reflective depth that turns into the next argument.
A daily structured reflection - minutes long - produces four ring scores in your own words, with full provenance.
Score your personality, character, resources, and well-being honestly - or write freely and let Gemma 4 (Google's most advanced on-device LLM) suggest scores from your text. Either way, you confirm. Every number is traceable to the sentence that produced it.
The app structures your thinking. You provide the truth.
“I never thought journaling could be this structured and still feel personal. Seeing the four rings light up was an instant shift in perspective.” M.K. · MBA, Cambridge Judge
Every entry is decomposed sentence by sentence. A private, on-device language model (Google's Gemma 4) proposes an interpretation and ring scores. Nothing is saved until you validate.
A guided prompt or a blank page. Plan your day, recap an evening, or work through a decision - in the same plain prose you'd use in a notebook.
Google's Gemma 4 runs entirely on your Mac. It splits the entry into sentences, writes a short interpretation for each, and proposes scores against the four rings and the 61+ validated variables. No network call. No account. No cloud.
Each proposed score sits next to its source sentence. Click 1-5 to confirm or adjust; reject a theme; add your own. Only the values you approve land in the dataset - with a permanent line back to the sentence that produced them.
Every reminder you complete moves a specific construct. Character is built indirectly - by what you do.
The Plan tab is a true Gantt chart: life goals, long-term projects, medium-term milestones, weekly habits and daily reminders, all stretched across a timeline from day to year. Every completed tick scores a construct.
Each goal or reminder can carry a cost. Costs roll up into a budget row at the bottom of the chart - so you can see, week by week, what your plan actually demands of your finances. Built for students juggling tuition, conferences, fieldwork, and rent.
“Connecting my daily habits to my long-term goals - and seeing the cost of all of it on one timeline - made everything click.” A.R. · Oxford, DPhil candidate
The structural equation model reveals the strongest pathways in your life, the hidden suppressors, and where to focus for maximum impact.
Visualise change over time across all four rings and their 61+ variables. Watch which pathways are strongest, which are suppressing your outcomes, and which to invest in next quarter.
Character strengthens as an indirect effect of completing the actions in your plan. The system shows that - quantitatively.
“The quarterly review showed me I was paradoxically lowering my income by working too hard. Once I adjusted, my resources and well-being increased.” D.S. · LSE faculty
From the first entry to the first quarterly review - what the practice actually does, on what schedule.
Complete one guided reflection and see your four rings scored. A new perspective on your life in minutes - structured, quantified, and entirely in your own words.
As you journal and tick off your plan, your scores shift in real time against your baseline. You start to see which actions actually change the readings.
Your personality expression across contexts becomes visible. Connections between character-driven actions and resource outcomes take shape on the chart.
A mixed methods, academic article is produced that informs the 4 Rings AI and a Dataset is produced that you can validate. Using Structural Equation Modelling & Thematic Analysis.
My conscientiousness was too high, my extraversion too low. Once I adjusted, my resources and well-being both increased.
4 Rings user · quarterly review insight
No subscription, no recurring fees. Like Things 3 or Bear - buy once, own it.
Validated constructs. Publication-grade data. Full transparency, end to end.
Aristotelian virtue and eudaimonia in a mixed-methods, intra-person study where n = 1. Full theoretical model, SEM validation, and empirical results.
Download PDF ↗The same research without academic jargon. Understand how the four constructs work together and why they matter for your life.
Download PDF ↗4 Rings produces a self-reported, intra-person (N-of-1) dataset structured around four constructs and the 61+ validated variables they comprise. Each data point is a daily average of scores derived from journal entries. All data is traceable to its source sentence - no opaque algorithmic inference.
For statistically valid analysis, the dataset requires at least 75 days of entries. This can be aligned with a university requirement for a Learning Journal or Reflections Journal - and printed with scores as evidence of reflective practice.
The data collection method is a deductive thematic approach: each journal entry is decomposed into themes that are pre-assigned from the four constructs and their 61+ variables - not discovered post-hoc. The inferential framework is idiographic (within-person), suitable for structural equation modelling and regression on the user's own data. Qualitative analyses include within-case thematic analysis and autoethnography. Suitable for courses and dissertations in behavioural economics, organisational behaviour, leadership, positive psychology, applied economics, entrepreneurship, and health & well-being.
The 4 Rings of Life is built on the doctoral research of J.P. de Borst - researcher, entrepreneur, author, and dissertation tutor.
Dr. Johan de Borst completed his PhD in Entrepreneurship Research at the University of Strathclyde - a fully funded scholarship - with a focus on applied and behavioural economics, specifically the relationship between income, personality, eudaimonia, and hedonic well-being.
He is also a dissertation tutor with 3,500+ five-star reviews, working with students from Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, LSE, Imperial, and other leading universities. 4 Rings is the practical expression of his research.
Every 4 Rings purchase comes with a free copy of Our Lit, the novel - where the four rings were born.