Try the bucket.

It’s the idea that small things add up. In Bucket, everything you log — food and drink, fragrance and chemicals, exertion, stress — adds a little to a bucket, more if it was strong or long, and fades over the following days. When too much lands close together the bucket overflows, and that’s when symptoms tend to show up. Your bucket shows how full you are today as a percentage and a word: low, moderate, high or near overflow.

Log what happens and let Bucket look back for you: it checks for things that come before a symptom anywhere from the same day to about three and a half days earlier — the delayed reactions that are easy to miss in a list. It only shows a pattern once it has turned up many separate times, still holds after allowing for your sleep and tiring days, and holds in both halves of your diary. It describes what tends to follow what; it never says what caused it.

It depends on what you log, not on a set number of days: Bucket shows a pattern once there’s enough in your diary to stand behind it, so it won’t show you one it can’t back up. Your bucket itself works from day one.