| Date | Activities | activity level | Sleep | predicted fatigue | morning fatigue | fatigue | evening fatigue | Note | |
| 1/1/2016 | Van Ness Philz (300m), Larkin/Turk (1.2km), 5+5 pushups | 5 | 7 | 5.1 | 4.9 |
I use Google Sheet. It is free, and, more importantly, you can access from your smartphone. Being able to work on your smartphone while lying down is a must if you are spending half of your waking hours lying on couch or bed like I do. Having to get up, fire up the laptop just to log is a drag, trust me, especially when you are sick.
Logging the daily activities requires only one line on the spreadsheet. And it doesn't take more than a minute. You don't need to recount your whole day; you only need to log top 4 or 5 activities that matters. And that's fine since you are not going to engage in a slew of activities anyway if you are a CFS patient.
Activity level is a subjective rating of the intensity/amount for the day as whole. The scale of 1-5 should be good enough though I use 1-6. (My rating system has evolved rather than designed. The maxim of "do as I day, not as I do" applies here). To determine the rating, imagine the most you can do and rate that as 5. And doing the least gets the rating of 1. The middle is 3 and somewhere in betweens get 2 or 4.
I also use an activity tracker to track my activities, and the tracker data is what I use in my analysis, not the Activity Level field from my log. If you don't have an activity tracker, you may want to use finer scale of 1-9 for the Activity Level. It's a bit more difficult to judge in finer level, but that may aid you better in the analysis.
One note on activity tracking: taking shower takes quite a bit out of you. I used to take my activity tracker off when taking shower. Then I noticed that my numbers didn't quite match up with the log. I evetually realized that the showers were the culprit. I've been wearing my tracker while taking shower ever since then. So you will want a water resistant/proof tracker if you want to get one.
The sleep is also a subjective rating of how well I slept rather than how long I stayed in bed. So far, I haven't found a good use for this variable. The correlation between sleep and fatigue has been minimal -- it's been all about activities in my case. And the sleep depends on the activities, making it another response variable rather than a controlling one.
Predicted Fatigue is the fatigue that I predict for the next day. The whole point of logging is to learn the relationship between activities and resulting fatigue. And being able to predict is the only proof that you truly understand the relationship. You could explain after the fact, but that's not going to get you anywhere. You have to be able to predict. I come up with prediction by looking at the activity level of preceding days.
Fatigue field is the actual fatigue of the following day. (In my example above, it would be the fatigue on 1/2, not 1/1). This can be a bit confusing, but there is a good reason to log this way. When analyzing the data, it's much simpler to have the activities and the resulting fatigue on the same line rather than having to look at the next line to figure out the fatigue caused by the activity on a given day.
My fatigue rating scale also evolved and probably not the best example to use. So you can pretty much ignore the value in my examples. Instead, I recommend the scale of 1 to 5 for the fatigue rating, with 1 being your worst day and 5 being your best day. 3 is the middle one and it is important to clearly establish what 3 means. For me, it is being able to take care of all ADL (activities of daily living) with the most struggle. If I start giving up, it's less than 3. If I struggle less and be able to do more than just ADL, it is above 3.
Alternatively, you can use a finer scale of 1-9. This is actually what I do in reality. In this scale, 5 would be the middle (representing being able to take care of all ADL with lots of struggle, in my case).
I used to log the fatigue for the whole day. Then I noticed that fatigue can vary within a day, sometimes substantially. So I divided it into morning (8AM-1PM), afternoon (1PM-6PM) and evening (6PM-11PM) . I'm still long way off from being able to predict fatigue on hourly basis, so this has not been terribly useful for me. You could just long one fatigue for the whole day.
The resulting simplified log, with the fatigue scale of 1-9, would look like this:
| Date | Activities | Activity Level | Sleep | Predicted Fatigue | Fatigue | Explanation |
| 1/1/2016 | Van Ness Philz (300m), Larkin/Turk (1.2km), 5+5 pushups | 4 | 7 | 5 | 4 |
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