A Notes Page for a 90-Day Supplement Trial When You Work Alone

When you run a one-person business, anything that needs daily attention competes with quotes, invoices and the van. A 90-day trial of a new supplement is exactly the sort of thing that gets opened with good intentions and forgotten by week three. The fix is not more discipline. It is a page so small that filling it in costs almost nothing.

Here is a layout you can rule up in your job diary, set up in a notes app, or print once and pin by the kettle.

The header block

Put this at the top of the page and fill it in before you take anything.

• Product and dose: what it is and how much you plan to take, copied from the label.
• Start date: the day you take the first one.
• Guarantee deadline: the last day of any refund window, worked out from the seller's own terms. Add it to your phone calendar as well.
• What I'm watching: one or two specific things, such as "how my legs feel at the end of a day on site". Avoid "feel better", which you can't score.
• Checked with: a tick once you have asked your pharmacist or GP, especially if you take prescribed medication or have a health condition. Do this before you start.

Staple the order confirmation to the back of the page, or photograph it and note where the picture lives. If you ever ask for a refund, you will want it to hand.

The daily row

Each day gets one line with four boxes:

1. Date
2. Taken? Yes or no.
3. Score out of five for the thing you chose to watch.
4. Day type in a few words: heavy lifting, desk day, bad night's sleep, day off.

The day-type box does the real work. A low score after a week of loft clearances means something different from a low score during a week of paperwork. Without that context, you are left staring at numbers and guessing.

If you miss a day, write "missed" and move on. A gap is information, not a failure.

A baseline strip

Before you start, if you can spare a few days, fill in a handful of rows with scores but no "taken" tick. That strip is your baseline. If you've already begun, write down where you think you were on day one and mark it "estimate". An honest guess is better than comparing the product with a vague memory of yourself.

Tie it to something you already do

The log only works if you actually touch it. Pick a moment that already happens every day, such as the first brew of the morning or locking the van at the end of a job, and do the entry then. Keep the pen on the page or the note pinned on your phone's home screen so there is nothing to look for.

Choosing a trial product that asks little of you helps too. One thing to remember each day is easier to track than a handful of steps.

The review boxes

At the bottom of the page, leave space for a few check-ins spread across the 90 days, for example roughly a third and two-thirds of the way through, plus one well before the guarantee deadline. At each one, spend five minutes and write:

• The average feel of your scores, in your own words rather than a calculation.
• Any pattern linked to the day-type column.
• One line: carry on, adjust, or stop.

Leaving the final review until the last week is how the refund window gets missed. Put the check-ins in your calendar on day one, alongside the deadline.

The decision box

Finish with a short box headed "Verdict". Write what you hoped to notice, what you actually noticed, and whether you would pay for it again. If the answer is unclear, that is a result too, and it is better to know before the deadline than after.

If you want more on the reasoning behind this kind of log, there is a short guide to keeping simple notes through a 90-day supplement trial that covers the setup, the daily entries and the check-ins in more detail.

Keep it small

The test of a good log is whether you would still fill it in on a rotten Friday after a twelve-hour day. If it takes more than a minute, cut a box. Dates, a yes or no, a score and a few words are plenty. Anything beyond that is the first thing to go when work gets busy, and then you are back to having no record at all.