The Good Day / Bad Day Diary: The Simplest Way to Know When It's Time

Nobody can tell you when it's time. But almost every owner who has been through it says the same thing afterwards: the day-to-day blurred. A bad Tuesday felt like the worst day ever, then Wednesday was good and hope came rushing back, and by the following month nobody could honestly say whether things had got worse or not.

The good day / bad day diary fixes that. It is the least clinical tool in end-of-life care and, for a lot of families, the most useful.

How it works

At the same time every evening, you make one judgement and write down one word. Not a score out of ten. Not a paragraph. Just: was today a good day or a bad day for them?

That's it. A calendar on the fridge with a G or a B. A note on your phone.

The rule that makes it work is that you define what a good day means once, at the start, while you can still think clearly — and then you don't move the goalposts. Write the definition down.

For most dogs and cats a good day looks something like:

• They ate willingly, without being coaxed
• They got up on their own to greet you or move rooms
• They did at least one thing they've always enjoyed
• They were not obviously painful, panting or restless
• They toileted without an accident or distress

A bad day is any day that fails two or more of those. Pick the ones that fit your animal — a cat who has never greeted anybody in her life shouldn't be marked down for it.

Reading it back

After three or four weeks you'll have something no memory can give you: a pattern.

• Mostly Gs with the odd B — you have time. Keep going, keep logging.
• Roughly half and half — this is usually the window where hospice care, pain-medication reviews and honest conversations with your vet matter most. Ask what can be adjusted.
• More Bs than Gs, two weeks running — most vets would say the conversation is now, not later. Not necessarily today, but now.
• Runs of consecutive Bs — the good days have stopped being able to interrupt the bad ones. That's usually the clearest signal there is.

The reason the diary is so powerful is that you're not deciding anything on the hardest day. You're reading a record you wrote on ordinary evenings, when you were calm, using a definition your clearer-headed self chose.

Why it protects you afterwards

The guilt that follows this decision almost always attaches to timing. *Did I wait too long? Did I go too soon?*

A diary answers that. Not perfectly — nothing does — but you will have a page in front of you showing the last three weeks were fourteen bad days and four good ones. It is very hard to argue yourself into "I acted too soon" when the evidence is written in your own handwriting.

Several families have told us they kept the diary long after, and re-read it in the weeks that followed. It stopped being a decision tool and became the thing that let them stop interrogating themselves.

What to do with it

Take it to your vet. Say, "Here's the last month. What do you see?" It changes the conversation completely — from a vague *how's he doing?* to a shared reading of the same evidence. Vets can tell you far more when they have a trend than when they have a snapshot in a consulting room, where most pets are running on adrenaline anyway.

A fridge calendar and a pen works perfectly. The tool matters far less than the honesty.

When the diary says it's time

Then you make the call, and the practice takes it from there. You will have done the hardest part already, which was paying attention when it would have been so much easier not to.