How to read your Daykept report — entries, streaks, and mood over time

You can feel whether journaling is going well. You cannot always see it. The Report screen turns months of entries into a few clear numbers: how often you write, how much you write, how your mood has shifted. It is not analytics for the sake of it — it is a mirror for a habit you are trying to build.

Week, Month, Year — pick your lens

At the top of the Report screen you can switch between Week, Month, and Year views. Use the arrows on either side of the date to move backward and forward in time.

Week view is useful for checking in mid-week — are you on track? Month view shows the shape of a full month at a glance. Year view is where patterns become undeniable: the months you were consistent, the stretches you fell off, and what was happening when both occurred.

The three summary numbers

Three cards sit below the date selector. Together they answer the question: "how am I doing?"

• Entries. How many times you wrote during the selected period. One entry per day is a great target. One per week still adds up to 52 a year. Both are worth tracking.
• Words. Total word count across all entries in the period. This number tends to surprise people — small daily entries accumulate into thousands of words over a month. Seeing it makes the habit feel tangible.
• Day Streak. Consecutive days with at least one entry, plus your all-time best streak below it. The streak number is optional motivation — some people are energized by it, others prefer to ignore it. Either approach is fine.

Monthly Activity chart

Below the summary cards, the bar chart shows entries per month. Taller bars mean more writing. Shorter bars mean lighter months. A month with no bar at all is a gap worth noticing — not judging, just noticing.

The chart is most useful in Year view, where you can see the full shape of the year. If May is consistently your lowest month, that is useful information. If you wrote twice as much in autumn, that is worth understanding too.

Mood Distribution

The bottom section shows how your logged moods break down across the period: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Neutral, and Others. Each mood appears as a horizontal bar with a count on the right.

Mood data only appears here if you log a mood when you write an entry. It does not need to be precise — a rough sense of how you felt is enough. Over time, the distribution shows trends that are hard to perceive day-to-day: a stretch of neutral weeks, a spike in joy during one particular month, a period where energy was low.

The goal is not to optimize for a particular mood. It is to notice what was actually happening and connect it to the entries you wrote during that time.

How to use the report well

Check it at the end of each month, not every day. The report is a retrospective tool, not a dashboard. Open it, look at the three numbers, glance at the chart, and read a few entries from the months where the bars were highest or lowest. That is the whole review. It takes five minutes and tells you more than any daily check could.

If you are new to Daykept, start with what a daily check-in actually is. Once you have a few weeks of entries, the Report screen becomes worth opening. For structuring what you write, see how templates help you get started.