How to Read Back Your Own Notes: Look Down the Column, Not Along the Row
Keeping notes about your mood and energy is the easy half. Reading them back so a pattern shows up is the half most people skip. Here is a simple way to do it.
Plenty of people keep notes on how they feel. A line in a diary, a mark in a margin, a few words on a bad afternoon. Far fewer ever read those notes back in a way that tells them anything. The notes pile up, the memory of each week stays vivid for about a fortnight, and the pattern, if there is one, stays invisible.
The usual way to read a record is along the row: this week, then last week, then the one before. That is how a story reads. It is a poor way to spot something that repeats, and there is a better one.
Why reading along the row fails
When you read one stretch of time after another, every stretch looks like its own event. A flat week gets an explanation: the deadline, the weather, the argument on Tuesday. Those explanations are usually true. They are also usually incomplete, because each one is tidy enough to stop you asking whether the same thing happened last month.
Memory does the same. We remember the reason for a bad day far better than the date of it, so the dates never get compared.
One stretch of time is weather. Several of them, lined up, are climate.
Put the same day in the same place
The trick is to make every round of notes the same shape, so that the same position in each round lines up. If every month has a grid of thirty or so boxes, then day four sits in the same spot on every page. Now you can read down instead of along.
Run a finger down the column for day four across six pages, then day fourteen, then day twenty-two. You are no longer asking what happened this month. You are asking what tends to happen on this day, and whether it is the same each time.
Two numbers beat a paragraph
A paragraph is lovely to write and very hard to compare. Two small scores are the opposite. Mood out of five, energy out of five, one mark each, takes seconds and gives you something you can look at side by side.
Keep them separate. Mood and energy do not always move together, and the days when they split, good mood and no energy, or plenty of energy and a foul temper, are often the most informative ones.
Add a short legend of your own for the things you want to follow, a dot or a letter in the box, and you have enough to work with. Resist the urge to track everything. A record you can fill in while the kettle boils is a record you will still be keeping in March.
What to look for after six rounds
- Which day numbers carry most of your marks?
- Which stretch of the month has your lowest energy scores, and which has your best?
- What have you been scheduling in exactly that low stretch?
- What have you been blaming on something else that keeps turning up on the same dates?
- What helped more than once, as opposed to what helped once?
The third question is the one that tends to land. Many people discover they have been putting their hardest commitments into their lowest-energy days, simply because nobody ever showed them the column.
Keep it honest
- Fill it in as you go, not from memory at the end of the month. Recalled scores drift towards the dramatic.
- Score the dull days too. A run of threes is information.
- Do not edit earlier pages when you think you have spotted a pattern. The record is only useful if it was written before you had a theory.
- Read it back in one sitting, with a pen, and write one sentence about what you would do differently.
A word of care. A record like this shows you what happened. It does not diagnose anything, and it is not a replacement for a doctor. If something in your pages worries you, bring them to an appointment. Dates and scores written at the time are far more useful there than a ten-minute attempt to remember.
The book
The Cycle Journal is built around this way of reading. It has 26 cycle spreads, which is two full years, each with a 35-day grid and a legend you write yourself, mood and energy scales, and three questions to answer at the end of every cycle: what stood out, what you told yourself, and what you want to remember. Three short guides show you how to read a pattern out of your own pages, and eight lined pages at the back catch anything the grid missed. It is 6 x 9 inches, 76 pages, undated, and nothing on the cover says what it is. It is a personal record and not medical advice.