Record the date, whether you flared, a plain-language description, sleep, stress, and anything new that day. That is enough to find most patterns. Detail beyond that tends to cost you the habit, and a record you stopped keeping is worth less than a rough one you kept.
Six fields: the date, whether the condition was active, a short description in your own words, sleep, stress, and anything new. Log those every day and you will have enough to work with in about two months.
Everything past that is optional, and the cost of adding it is not the thirty seconds. It is the day you look at a long form, decide you cannot face it, and skip. Two weeks of skipping and the record is gone.
The comparison people imagine is a detailed record against a basic one. The real comparison is a detailed record against a kept one, and those are rarely the same record.
This is well documented in research on paper symptom diaries. When Stone and colleagues fitted diaries with hidden sensors that logged when the binder was actually opened (BMJ, 2002), reported compliance was around 90 per cent while actual compliance was closer to 11 per cent. People were filling several days in at once, from memory, shortly before handing the diary in.
That failure mode matters more than missing fields, because memory does not fail randomly. You remember the bad days and the dramatic exposures. You forget the ordinary Tuesday. A record reconstructed a week later is systematically biased towards the story you already believe.
Precision you cannot sustain. Weighing portions, timing exposures to the minute, rating four separate body areas. It is not that the detail is useless, it is that it does not survive a bad week, and the gap it leaves is worse than never having tried.
Fields with no plausible mechanism. If you cannot say out loud why something might matter for you, it is noise, and every extra column makes a coincidence easier to find by chance.
Retroactive reconstruction. Filling in Monday to Thursday on a Friday is not tracking, it is recalling. If you miss days, leave them blank. A gap is fine. An invented entry is worse than nothing because you will treat it as real.
Logging only when things are bad. The most common and most damaging habit. If you only open the app when your skin is angry, every entry you own is a flare entry, so everything you ever do correlates with flaring.
Write what you observed, not what you concluded. "Itchy behind both knees, woke twice" is a record. "Bad reaction to dairy" is a hypothesis wearing a record's clothes, and once it is written down you will read it back as evidence.
Keep the conclusion in a separate line if you want to capture the hunch. It is worth capturing. It is just not the same kind of thing as an observation, and the difference matters when you review three months of notes and try to work out what you actually saw.
Date, whether the condition was active that day, a short description in your own words, hours of sleep, a rough stress rating, and anything new you ate, used or did. Six fields covers most of what patterns are made of.
A number is useful mainly for comparing your own days against each other, and only if you apply it consistently. If you find yourself agonising over whether today is a 6 or a 7, a three-point scale of better, same or worse will serve you just as well.
No. Photographs are useful for slow change you cannot see day to day, so a weekly photo in the same light is worth more than a daily one in whatever light you happen to be in.
Yes, and it is the single most skipped thing. Without calm days on record you have nothing to compare flares against, so every habit you have looks like a trigger.
Next in the method: Why skin reactions show up a day or two late, and how to log for it
Tracking day to day? Moya's eczema tracking app · psoriasis tracker
A daily check-in that takes under a minute, and lays your own entries back out over time.
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