Paper diary or a tracking app, I have tried each for a month and hated both Coping

Whichever one you will still be doing in March, and honestly that is usually the one that takes under thirty seconds.

What matters is not the tool, it is recording a small number of things every day rather than a lot of things on bad days. If you only log the bad days you have no baseline and the data tells you nothing.

My five columns, filled in at the same time each evening:

• Sleep hours, roughly.
• Migraine yes or no, plus a 1 to 3 severity.
• Caffeine, count.
• Meal skipped, yes or no.
• One free text word if something unusual happened.

That lives in a spreadsheet on my phone because I can export it and sort it. Apps are lovely until you want to look at twelve months at once.

Paper, but a wall calendar with one dot per day rather than a notebook. Visible, takes two seconds, and you can read a month of pattern from across the room.

Whatever you use, bring it to appointments. My doctor changed her advice after seeing eight weeks of consistent logs in a way that describing it out loud never achieved.

Record the days you took something and how quickly, too. Mine showed I was waiting an average of two hours, which was its own finding.