Most symptom trackers fail the same way. They ask for too much, every day, and the first week is complete, the second is patchy, and by the third the whole thing has been abandoned — usually during exactly the stretch that would have been most worth recording.
So the constraint that decides this list is not “what would be interesting to know”. It is what still gets logged in a bad week. Ten things, each of which earns its place by changing what an appointment can do.
1. Period start dates
The single most valuable item, and the one with the best ratio of effort to usefulness. Dates only — lengths are derived, and derived numbers can be recalculated when you change your mind about what counted.
Include the ambiguous ones, marked as ambiguous. Whether a light two-day bleed counted is the difference between one 62-day gap and two 31-day ones, and those describe completely different situations.
2. Bleeding character
How heavy, how many days, and whether it differed from the last one. This is what distinguishes “irregular” from “irregular and heavy”, and the second has its own implications — including for iron, which is a common contributor to fatigue.
3. Fatigue
Log it as days it occurred, not as a severity rating out of ten. Severity ratings drift: a 7 in March and a 7 in September are not the same 7, because your reference point moved. A count of days does not have that problem.
Fatigue also has several checkable explanations and is the symptom most likely to be attributed rather than investigated — including a specific screening step in the guideline that many people are never offered.
4. Bloating or abdominal discomfort
Common, and one of the symptoms most likely to turn out to run with something else — sleep, the cycle, a medication start. It is also one that is impossible to reconstruct later, because it does not leave a trace the way a period date does.
5. Pain
Where, roughly how bad, and which days relative to the bleed. The timing relative to the cycle carries more information than the intensity, and it is the part memory loses first.
6. Skin
Breakouts, and where. Jawline and lower face specifically, because distribution is part of what makes acne evidential rather than incidental in this context.
Count days affected, per month. “My skin’s been bad” is not something an appointment can act on; “breakouts on fourteen days of the last thirty, mostly the week before a period” is.
7. Hair — both kinds
Unwanted growth, and scalp thinning. These are not cosmetic footnotes; clinical hyperandrogenism is one of the three diagnostic criteria and these are how it is assessed.
They also run on the slowest timescale of anything here — change takes months to become visible — which makes them the items where a written record most outperforms memory. Note when something started, and photograph rather than describe.
8. Mood
Not a diary. Just a rough marker of how the day was, most days.
The reason it earns a place is that it is the item most often left out of a “medical” record and most often relevant — and, in the guideline, emotional wellbeing and quality of life are treated as part of PCOS care rather than as an aside. A record that includes it can show that the bad stretches are not random.
9. Sleep
Roughly how long, whether it was broken, and how you felt the next day. Three seconds, and the third part is the one that matters most: waking unrefreshed after enough hours is a specific pattern, and it disappears entirely from any log that records duration alone.
10. Medications and supplements, with start dates
Everything, including the things bought without a prescription and the ones that feel too trivial to mention.
The start date is the load-bearing part. A symptom that began three weeks after something started is a different conversation from one that has been there for years, and three months later nobody remembers which it was.
The two things that are not symptoms but belong anyway
Lab results, with their dates and reference ranges. Photograph the whole page. A value is uninterpretable without its own laboratory’s range, and the trend across three results says something no single one can.
Anything unusual. Being ill. A stressful fortnight. Travel. A big change in routine. Six months later this is what stops an odd stretch looking like a signal — and a false pattern is worse than no pattern, because it gets acted on.
The rule that keeps it honest
Log what happened, not how you feel about it.
Days, dates and counts survive comparison with themselves months later. Severity scores and summary judgements do not, because the scale moves underneath you without announcing it, and because both are shaped by the day you are writing on.
Gaps are fine
A record with gaps is a record. The weeks you stop logging are usually the weeks you felt worst, which means the gaps are frequently informative in their own right — and a tracker that demands a perfect daily streak produces abandonment rather than better data.
Three months is roughly the point at which this becomes worth reading back, because that is when a run of bad days separates from a pattern. There is no reward for a complete grid, and no penalty for a fortnight you missed. The record is for you, and it is what the appointment can act on.