Tracking Your Cycle on Paper, Without an App

I used a cycle app for six years. It was fine. It told me what it predicted, it was wrong often enough to be annoying, and at some point I realised I had no clear idea what it knew about me or who else did.

I went back to paper out of irritation rather than principle. What I did not expect was that the paper version told me more.

An app gives you a forecast. A page gives you what happened

This is the real difference and it took me a while to see it. An app takes your data, averages it and hands you a prediction. That prediction is a summary of you, made by something that decided in advance what mattered.

A page has no opinion. You fill in the boxes as the days go, and at the end of the month it sits there in your own handwriting: this is what happened. Not a forecast. A record. A record is the thing you can actually use, whether you are planning a holiday or sitting in front of a doctor with ten minutes.

Nothing syncs, and that turns out to matter

A cycle is about as personal as data gets. On paper there is no account, no export and no terms that changed in March. The book is in your drawer. That is the entire privacy policy.

How to set it up

You need very little: a grid of days, a legend you write yourself and two scales.

• The grid. Thirty-five boxes, one per day, starting on the first day of bleeding. Thirty-five rather than twenty-eight, because real cycles are not tidy and a grid that runs out is a grid you abandon.
• The legend. Decide your own marks in month one and write them down. A shaded box, a dot, a letter. It does not matter what you choose. It matters that in six months you still know what you meant.
• The scales. Mood and energy, one to five, once per cycle, looking back across the whole month. This is the part people skip and it is the part that turns three months of boxes into something readable.

The first three months

Fill the boxes in on the day, not from memory on the last evening. Memory smooths things out and the rough version is the useful one.

Do not go looking for a pattern yet. Three cycles is not a pattern, it is three cycles. Write down the odd months too, and next to them whatever else was going on: a move, a virus, a fortnight of five-hour nights.

One cycle is weather. Six cycles is climate.

Reading it sideways

Once you have six, stop reading month by month and start reading down the same column across all of them. Day four of every cycle. Then day fourteen. Then day twenty-two.

That is where a pattern lives, if there is one. Most people find that one particular week collects most of their marks. Then they find they have been scheduling the hardest things in exactly that week, for years, without ever noticing.

What to do with a full year

Thirteen cycles is enough to be taken seriously, by yourself as much as by anybody else. Photograph the pages before you hand the book to anyone. Mark the cycles that were unusual and write next to them what else was going on that month.

Then start the second year in the same book. The comparison is the whole value, and it only exists if both years are in one place.

What this is and is not

I want to be plain about it. This is a personal record. It is not medical advice and it does not predict anything. If something in it worries you, the book is the most useful object you can take to a doctor: dates, duration and how you actually felt, written down at the time rather than recalled in a hurry.

The book

The Cycle Journal is twenty-six of these spreads, which comes to two years. Undated, so you begin on whatever day you begin, and plain enough on the outside to leave on a shelf.