How to journal so you don't quit after a week

For six months now I’ve been tracking changes in my skin. Every change, every little detail goes into a journal, every single day. And somewhere around month five, it started driving me nuts.

I have seborrheic dermatitis. I wanted to figure out how food and skincare affect my skin, so I started two journals in the notes app on my phone: one for food, one for skincare.

I really wanted to quit. But I didn’t.

What drove me nuts

Every day I wrote down the tiniest changes in my skin. And seborrheic dermatitis shows up in a lot of places: forehead, scalp, temples, eyebrows, around the nose, neck, and in my case the chest too. All of it had to be described in words, so I could actually analyze something later.

Go through all the photos. Spot what wasn’t there yesterday or a week ago. Write it down. It takes about five minutes, and they feel like forever. Plus, typing on a phone is a pain.

First one day, then three

Near the end of month three I started skipping. Not all at once: first one day, then two, then three.

And this is where it gets really annoying. You realize you now have to fill in three days, not one. Go through the photos to see where, when and what you ate. Remember which ointment or cream you put on. Did you wash your hair with the special shampoo or the regular one? Okay, did you even wash your hair at all? Try remembering what you had for breakfast yesterday!

I felt a crazy amount of resistance to filling it all in.

But I saw what works

Thanks to the journals, I started seeing patterns: how the food I ate today or a couple of days ago affects my skin. And how skincare does.

The simplest example. In July I was completely fed up, burned out, basically. One evening I went to the store, bought a bottle of wine and drank half of it right away, with a pizza. A couple of days later my skin got noticeably worse: more itching, more flaking. I stopped drinking wine and everything went back to normal. Nothing else had changed — not my skincare, not my diet.

Or oat milk in my morning cappuccino. For most people it’s supposedly harmless. For me, it causes a slight burning on the sides of my nose. No oat milk — everything’s fine. Oat milk — it starts to itch a little.

Why I didn’t quit

I split my treatment into stages, about a month to a month and a half each. Skin cells renew in about 28 days on average. To know whether a food or skincare routine works, you have to wait at least 28 days, ideally a bit longer.

I knew why I was keeping the journal. That’s why it’s been going on for six months now.

How you can keep going

If you started a journal and a week later you can’t be bothered, ask yourself: why are you keeping it?

Maybe you want to track changes in your diet, your workouts, something else. A journal needs a specific goal. When you don’t know why you’re keeping it, you get lazy about it.

Then decide what you want to track and what you’ll write down.

And make a template you just copy and paste into the next day. In it you tick boxes: had this, didn’t have that. And the text fields you just fill in.

But that’s still tiring. That’s why I made Tenot. Filling in a journal there takes not even a minute — a few seconds. Too lazy to type? Just say it out loud, and the AI inside the app writes it down for you. And later the charts make it easy to see what depends on what.