Your wearable is good at measuring your body and blind to much of your life. It can fill in steps and recorded workouts automatically. It does not know you had three glasses of wine, argued with someone, or started a new medication.
The Journal brings both together. Automatic items carry over what NOYU can measure, while your check-ins add the context no device can see. That combination is what helps NOYU move from telling you your recovery is down to finding why.
Automatic items
Steps, cardio, strength and time in heart rate zone 2 appear automatically when NOYU has wearable data for that day. You do not need to tick them yourself.
Each has a daily target, such as 7,000+ steps or 30+ mins of zone 2. Change a target under Customise and NOYU immediately applies the new target to your existing history too. It does not need to wait for new days or rewrite old entries.
An automatic item only counts a day when its source data is available. Missing wearable data stays unknown rather than being treated as zero. A target that is still below its threshold today stays in progress until the day is over.
What you can log
Alongside the automatic items, there are around a hundred built-in items across ten areas: Nutrition, Sleep, Recovery, Mental Health, Health and Symptoms, Hormonal Health, Lifestyle, Medication, Supplements, and your own items.
Most are a simple yes or no: did you drink alcohol, take caffeine, eat late, stretch. Some ask a follow-up, so alcohol can carry how many drinks and caffeine can carry the time you had your last one. Others are a rating, like mood, energy and stress.
The short list
Logging a hundred things daily is not a real proposal, so you keep a short list of the items you track.
If you have never changed it, you start with eight: caffeine, alcohol, mood, energy, feeling anxious, screens in bed, late meals and stretching. That is a sensible spread across sleep, mood and the two substances that move the numbers most.
Change it whenever. If you clear it entirely, NOYU takes that as a deliberate choice rather than resetting you to the defaults.
One entry per item per day
Most items hold one value per day, and logging again updates it rather than adding a second entry.
Some items accept times as well, so you can note that your last coffee was at 4pm, which is often the useful part.
A few items are moments and can be logged several times a day when you log for today. Filling in a past day writes a single daily entry.
Backfilling
You can log any past day, and NOYU never locks a date.
Do note that anything already calculated from that day, such as a score or an insight, reflects the data as it stood when it ran. Filling in last Tuesday will not retroactively rewrite last Tuesday's analysis.
Custom items
You can add your own, and they are always a plain yes or no with no follow-up.
Good ones are specific and repeatable: "physio exercises", "sauna", "worked from office", "took antihistamine".
Deleting a custom item removes it from your list but keeps everything you already logged, so your history stays intact.
How much to log
Fewer items, logged consistently, beat many items logged sporadically. This is not encouragement, it is a technical constraint.
To find whether something affects you, NOYU needs at least five days where you did it and five where you did not. An item logged twice a week for a month is worth less than one logged daily for a fortnight, and an item you always answer the same way can never show a pattern because there is nothing to compare.
Pick three or four things you suspect matter, log them for a month, and you will have something real. Then change the list.
Your streak
The summary view shows a year-long grid of logged days and your current run.
It is there because a picture of your consistency is useful, but it is not a game and there is nothing to lose. Missing a day costs you nothing beyond that day's data, and NOYU will not scold you about it.
