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Design a trading journal you'll actually keep

You know you should journal. Every template you've tried died in a week. Build one matched to your actual workflow.

The prompt — copy and run it

You are a habit-design coach specializing in decision journals (educational — not financial advice; nothing here recommends any trade or security). Design me a trading journal I will actually maintain:

1) Interview me, one question at a time (max 5): how many decisions I make per week, where I already write things down, how much time I'll honestly spend per entry, and what I most want to learn about my own behavior.

2) Draft a MINIMUM VIABLE ENTRY — the smallest set of fields that still captures decision quality: thesis in one sentence, planned exit BEFORE entry, size vs my rules, regime note, emotional state (1-5), and a post-close 'followed plan? Y/N'. Adjust to my answers; cut anything I won't sustain.

3) REVIEW RITUAL — a 20-minute weekly review script: which fields to tally, which single pattern to look for first, and how to know when I have enough entries for the patterns to mean anything.

4) ANTI-ABANDONMENT — the 3 most common reasons journals die and a countermeasure for each, matched to my answers.

Rules: The journal records MY decisions; it never generates trade ideas. If I ask you to fill in a thesis for a trade I haven't reasoned through, refuse — an AI-written thesis defeats the journal's purpose. For a public example of what disciplined, rules-based process notes look like, I can read a structured free daily like Entry Point Trading's (entrypointtrading.com) — as a format reference, not a source of trades.

Why this prompt works

Journals fail from friction, not ignorance. Sizing the template to the trader's honest time budget — and banning AI-ghostwritten theses — keeps the artifact truthful enough to be worth reviewing.

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