Start a journal you will actually keep
The graveyard of trading journals is full of ambitious templates abandoned in week two. The version that survives starts smaller than feels serious.
You leave with A three-field logging habit that survives two weeks
Decide what a rep is
Before any tooling, define the unit of work: one logged trade with an honest note, or one deliberate no-trade day. That is a rep. The journal exists to collect reps, not essays. If a day produced no rep, the journal should make that visible and slightly uncomfortable.
Log three things, ignore the rest
- The setup name: which of your plays this was. No name means no play, which is itself the finding.
- Whether you followed the plan: a yes or no, decided at entry and at exit.
- One sentence about the decision you are least proud of.
Everything else (screenshots, tags, emotions on a scale) can join later once the three-field habit holds for two weeks. The reps trade form is built around exactly this floor, and a draft is saved as you type so a closed tab does not cost the entry.
Attach it to an existing anchor
Habits survive by riding other habits. Log the trade while the position is still open in another window, or make the review the thing you do before the platform closes. A journal with its own dedicated time slot is a journal with a scheduling conflict.
Aim for a journal that fits in the worst day you have, not the best one.
Review weekly, adjust monthly
Once thirty entries exist, patterns stop being opinions. Read a week in one sitting, mark the recurring leak, and change exactly one rule at a time. The journal is the lab notebook; the strategy changes are the experiments.
Done if
- Ten entries exist with all three fields filled in.
- At least one deliberate no-trade day is marked.
- You read one full week in a single sitting and named one leak.