How to record a spread in five lines
spread journal
A short record format, what to always include and what you lose by writing down only the spreads that went well.
The journal almost always fails for the same reason: you start writing a page per spread and give up after two weeks. A five-line record survives for months, and the usefulness of the journal comes from accumulated volume, not from the detail of each entry.
The five lines are these. First: the date. Second: the question copied word for word, as you phrased it before shuffling, without tidying it up afterwards. Third: the cards with their positions, indicating which came up reversed. Fourth: the first thing you thought when you saw them, before consulting anything. Fifth: one sentence about how you felt when you finished.
The fourth line is the one doing the real work. That immediate reaction, unfiltered by what the book says, is your personal reading of the card, and after twenty or thirty entries it starts to form a fairly consistent vocabulary of your own. If you write the manual's definition instead, the journal becomes a copy of the manual and stops contributing anything.
There is a strong temptation to record only the clean spreads, the ones that fitted and left a good feeling. Those are precisely the least informative. The confusing spreads, the ones that said nothing and the ones that bothered you are the ones that change appearance when reread half a year later, once you know how the story went on.
It's worth setting a rereading moment, for example the first Sunday of each month, and giving it fifteen minutes. What you are looking for is not whether the cards got it right. You are looking for something else: which cards repeat, with which themes, and whether your questions are better phrased than three months ago. A clear sign of progress is seeing questions move from "what's going to happen with this?" to "what part of this depends on me?".
As for the medium, paper or a file makes no difference as long as you can search by card name. If you use paper, leave a few pages at the end for a simple index: note the card and the date each time it appears. That index, after a year, is the most valuable part of the whole journal.