Logging deltas, not absolutes three small +/- numbers beat a paragraph

For the first six months I wrote little paragraphs every week. 'Slept okay, energy a bit lower than last Thursday, ate normally but didn't fancy lunch on Wednesday.' Useful to me at the time, useless to anybody else, and impossible to compare across weeks because every paragraph used different language. The fix was almost embarrassingly small. I switched to three single-character entries: sleep, energy, hunger, each marked plus, equal, or minus, compared to the week before.

That's it. The whole entry takes thirty seconds. The unlock is what it does over time.

Eight weeks of three-character entries stacked vertically becomes a small graph you can read at a glance. The prescriber can scan it in five seconds instead of reading eight paragraphs. You can see the patterns yourself — a run of three minus-energies in a row stands out where it didn't in prose.

Eight weeks of three-character entries stacked vertically becomes a small graph you can read at a glance.

And the relativity is the whole point: I'm not claiming Wednesday's energy was a 4 out of 10 or a 6 out of 10, which I couldn't honestly say anyway. I'm just saying it was lower than last Wednesday. That's a thing I can actually feel.

Titra has free-form weekly notes — I just keep the format to three lines and put the prose elsewhere if I want it.