Counting sounds like the easy part, and it is the part that fails. Not because it is hard, but because nobody agrees on what one episode is, and because a number written down three hours later is a different number. Five rules, and they take about a minute to learn.
This is the whole game. A count reconstructed in the evening is not a smaller version of the truth — it is systematically wrong, and always in the same direction. You remember the bad ones. The three mild ones between two and four in the afternoon are gone, and they were a third of the day.
Whatever you use has to be reachable in the ten seconds while you are fanning yourself. A notebook in another room does not qualify.
Count waves, not minutes and not hours. An episode starts when the heat starts and ends when it settles. If it settles and comes back twenty minutes later, that is two — write two.
The edge case that trips people is the long roll: heat that rises and falls for half an hour without ever really stopping. Treat that as one, and make a note that it was a long one. What matters far more than the ruling itself is that you make the same ruling every time. A week counted by a consistent rule is comparable to the next week. A week counted by a rule that drifted is not comparable to anything.
Split them, and fix the boundary once — 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. is a common choice and a perfectly good one. A night episode costs more than a daytime one because it takes the rest of the night with it, and often the next day as well.
Combined into a single total, the two hide each other. A fortnight where daytime episodes halve and night episodes do not looks like a solid improvement in one number, and it is not the improvement you needed.
Rating every episode is how diaries get abandoned by Wednesday. One mark a day for the worst one is enough to tell whether the bad end of the range is moving, and it survives a busy week.
Pick a three-step scale and write your own definitions down on the first day, because the words drift otherwise. Something like: mild, you noticed it; moderate, you stopped what you were doing; severe, you changed clothes, stepped outside, or left the room.
If you forgot to count on Thursday, write "missed" — not nothing, and certainly not a guess. A zero in the wrong place drags an average down and makes a fortnight look better than it was.
This matters more than it sounds, because the arithmetic at the end divides by days of data. Nine days counted out of fourteen is a perfectly usable fortnight as long as you know it was nine.
All three work. They fail in different places, and which one suits you depends mostly on how long you intend to keep going.
| Method | Where it works | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Paper tally | Fastest possible mark, no unlocking, no battery, and nobody in the room knows what you are doing. Best thing there is for a single week. | It is only in one place. The sheet is at home when the flash is at work, and by week three it is somewhere under the post. |
| Notes app | Always in your pocket. Costs nothing, and fine if you already live in it. | Unlock, find the note, position the cursor, type — long enough that you start skipping the mild ones. And at the end you have a wall of text to count by hand. |
| A tracker | One tap, the timestamp is exact, day and night separate themselves, and the totals are done for you. | It is another app, and most of them ask for an account before they ask what is wrong with you. |
If this is your first week, start on paper. The free printable diary on this site has the day and night columns and the severity box already laid out, and a totals row at the bottom.
Two counts are not comparable until they are both divided by the days they came from. Sixty-one episodes over a fortnight and forty-five over ten days is not a drop of a quarter; it is 4.4 a day against 4.5 a day, which is no change at all.
So at the end of each stretch, write down two things: the total, and the number of days you actually counted on. Then divide. The frequency calculator will do it for you, including the night figures separately, and will tell you when a stretch is too short for the percentage to mean much.
Counting is not the point; comparing is. A number on its own answers nothing. A number before a dose change and a number after it, counted the same way, is the thing worth carrying into an appointment — and it is the reason to be strict about the rules above for a fortnight rather than vaguely diligent for a year.
Attune logs an episode in one tap from an iPhone or Apple Watch, with the exact time. Night episodes separate themselves, dose changes go on the chart as a line, and the before-and-after comparison is worked out without you doing arithmetic at midnight.
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