Ask yourself how last month felt and your memory will hand you a confident answer that is mostly fiction. The classic experiments behind the peak-end rule — including the memorably titled When More Pain Is Preferred to Less — showed that we judge past experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not by its actual run. One loud Thursday can repaint a perfectly decent month. That is the whole case for a mood tracker: dated dots don't editorialize.

Why researchers stopped trusting "how was your month?"

When scientists wanted to know how life actually feels day to day, they stopped asking global questions and started sampling days — the logic behind the Day Reconstruction Method, which rebuilt wellbeing measurement from small dated entries instead of sweeping self-summaries. A mood tracker is the household version of the same move. One dot per day, recorded close to the day itself, produces a record your December self can trust — and your December self is the one making decisions about next year.

Five inks, one tap

The tracker keeps the nightly decision almost embarrassingly small. Five pens sit above the calendar — rough, low, okay, good, bright — each with its own ink. Pick the color the day mostly was, tap today, and a hand-inked blot settles into the cell. Same ink tapped twice lifts the dot; a different pen re-inks it; yesterday accepts an honest late entry. Nothing else is asked of you: no rating scales, no notes required, no streak to defend.

Under the month, a plain italic line does the arithmetic — fourteen days dotted this month — good is doing most of the painting — with the per-ink counts beside it. That sentence is the product. Not the dots themselves, but the pattern your memory would have flattened: the low that clusters around certain meetings, the bright that reliably follows a protected weekend.

Where the tracker hands off

A dot is a summary, and some days refuse to be summarized. This tracker is deliberately the shallow end of HabitatZero's feelings family: when a day needs an actual word, the feelings chart holds thirty-six of them at three volumes; when one moment keeps circling and needs walking through, the emotion processing sheet takes it event → feeling → body → message → move. Dot daily, name weekly, process when a moment earns it — the three tools were built as a set.

And if the low ink is quietly winning month after month, treat the chart as information worth sharing with a professional, not a verdict to sit alone with. A dotted month is one of the most useful things you can hand someone whose job is to help.

Thirty-one cells. Five inks. One honest tap before the day starts telling stories about itself.