Your fortnight: fourteen days of practice, run through the Honelo journal

Why a fortnight, and why written down

Five lessons of reading is where most money books stop. What follows is the other half, and it is the half that decides whether any of this was worth your time.

Fourteen days is not a magic number, and nothing in this course's sources says it is. It was chosen for two dull reasons. It is long enough to look at the same figure twice, at the start and at the end, which is the smallest arrangement that can show you a change. And it is short enough to finish, which matters more than length, because an unfinished plan teaches you that plans do not get finished.

Every day costs nothing. The whole fortnight is looking, counting, checking, and writing down what you found. Not one day asks you to buy, move or commit money, and this is deliberate twice over: a plan that needed capital would be useless to most people reading it, and a plan that told you where to put capital would be a recommendation this course is not permitted to make. Attention is the input. It happens to be the input most people skip.

What you have at the end is fourteen dated entries. That is a smaller thing than it sounds and a bigger one than a finished book. A memory of how a book made you feel cannot be checked against anything. A dated record can. You can set day fourteen beside day one and see, without arguing with yourself, what moved and what did not.

One caution about the whole design, in the spirit of lesson 3. Doing this does not establish that anything will improve. It establishes what you found, when. Nothing in this course claims a fortnight of attention produces a financial result, and a course that made that claim would be doing exactly what lesson 3 criticised.

What the journal does, and what it does not

The record goes in your Honelo journal, at /journal. It is private to your account. Before the plan, here is exactly what the thing does, so that you build a habit around the tool that exists rather than the one you imagined.

It is one box of free text. You write, it saves, and it stamps the entry with the date. There are no fields, no categories and no scores.

Writing an entry on a day advances a streak. Two entries on the same day count once, so there is nothing to gain by front-loading. Miss a day and the streak restarts at one on your next entry. Miss exactly one day and you can bridge it with a restore, which is available once in a calendar month.

An entry saved from the end of a lesson carries that lesson with it, and the entry links back so you can find where the question came from. Any entry can be edited or deleted afterwards. There is an optional evening email that nudges you when a streak is about to lapse, and the switch for it sits on the journal page itself.

Now the part worth knowing before you start. The journal has no per-day prompts and no course plans built into it. There is one box, and that is the whole interface. So the fourteen prompts below are yours to carry across: open the journal, paste the day's prompt at the top of the entry, and write underneath it. Copying the prompt in is not busywork. It is what makes the entry readable in six months, when "£84" on its own will mean nothing.

The button at the end of the exercise below opens the journal with this exercise attached to it. Use it for day one. After that, go to the journal page directly, because the day's prompt is the thing you want at the top and you will be pasting it yourself.

A word on the streak, since it is the part most likely to take over. It counts days you turned up. It is not evidence of progress, and it says nothing at all about your money. Keep it if it gets you to the page and disregard it the moment the number starts to matter more than what you write under it.

What to write

Entries worth re-reading share a shape: a figure, where it came from, and the date. "Pension: 5% me, 3% employer, off the July payslip" beats four sentences about meaning to get on top of pensions, and it beats them by a distance that grows every month.

Write findings rather than plans. A plan is a claim about the future and it costs nothing to make, which is why the journal fills up with them if you let it. A finding is a fact about now. In six months the findings will be the reason the record was worth keeping.

"Nothing yet" is a real entry and should be written as one. The days where the answer is nothing (the login you could not find, the figure that was not there, the reply that has not come) are the ones most likely to be skipped, and skipping them turns a record into a highlight reel. A highlight reel cannot be checked against anything, which was the whole point.

Mark your estimates as estimates. Lesson 2 set out the accounting subject as the ability to produce monthly figures without guessing, and the marks are the honest map of where you are not there yet. An unmarked guess hardens into a fact within about a week.

One line is enough. This is a lab book. Diaries record feelings; this records results. Nobody is reading it, there is no style to keep up, and the entries that survive contact with your future self are the short factual ones.

Last, keep it clear of anything that needs advice. The journal is a record of what you found. It is not a plan, it is not a recommendation, and nothing you write in it becomes one by being written down.