There's a particular kind of good intention that shows up every December: this season, I'm going to keep a proper journal of my skiing. Log every day, save the photos, remember where I actually went. And then March arrives and you've got two tracks, forty near-identical photos of grey sky, and no real record of the winter at all.

I build a winter trips tracking app, so I've thought about this more than is probably healthy - and the thing I keep coming back to is that sticking with a season journal has almost nothing to do with willpower. It's about friction. Every little bit of effort between you and recording a day is a place the habit leaks out. Remove the friction and the journal assembles itself. Here's the system.

Record the whole season, not just the highlight reel

The instinct is to only bother tracking the days worth bragging about - the bluebird powder morning, the trip abroad. But a season journal isn't a collection of greatest hits. Its whole value is that it's complete. The flat-light Tuesday where you did six laps of the same blue run is part of the shape of your winter too, and six months later you'll be oddly glad it's in there.

The mechanics of keeping a tracker running all day - pocket, screen off, cold weather - I've covered separately in how to track your ski & snowboard runs on iPhone. The short version: it should be one tap at the bottom of the mountain and nothing else until you're back inside with a hot chocolate.

Win the battery battle before you leave the house

Nothing kills a journalling habit faster than holes in it. A dead phone at 11am means no track, which means a gap, which means the whole thing starts to feel pointless - and that's usually the day people quietly give up. The good news is that most of those gaps are avoidable, and the fix starts the night before.

Charge the night before. Make it part of packing, right next to finding your goggles and promising yourself you'll wax your skis. A full battery in the morning is the single biggest thing standing between you and a complete record. Then carry a power bank - a small one lives in my bag all winter. But there's one rule about that power bank that matters more than any other:

The rest is just keeping the phone happy: an inner chest pocket against your base layer, so your body heat keeps the battery chemistry ticking over, and a top-up over lunch (once it's warmed up) rather than on the chairlift. Get this right and a full day on a single charge is completely normal.

Shoot photos for the memory, not for the feed

Tracks are the skeleton of a journal. Photos are what put the flesh back on. But there's a trap here, and I fall into it every year: you take the same photo everyone takes - the summit panorama, the grey slope disappearing into cloud - and end up with forty of them and no memories.

The photos that actually bring a day back six months later are almost never the scenery shots. They're the specific ones. The absurd mountain of tartiflette you had for lunch. The tiny bar you found for après where the owner had a dog. Your mate sitting in the snow after a spectacular wipeout. The car park at the end of the day, everyone knackered and pulling their boots off. Those are the ones that work, because they're tied to a moment rather than a view.

So my only rule is: each day, take two or three photos of things other than the mountain - the food, the place you ended up, the people. Then keep them attached to that day. In Snowmate they hang off the session itself, so they don't vanish into a camera roll of three thousand near-identical slope shots. A trip you can scroll through day by day, photos and all, is a genuinely different thing to a folder of loose images.

Rate the day while it's still fresh

Tracks record what happened. Photos record what it looked like. Neither of them records how the day actually felt - and that turns out to be the bit you most want back when you look at a season later.

So capture it while it's fresh, ideally that evening before the details blur. In Snowmate you can rate the day across a few things that genuinely vary from trip to trip: overall conditions, how bad the lift queues were, the food, and a few more. It takes about twenty seconds, and it's weirdly satisfying.

The payoff is at season scale. Once you've rated twenty or thirty days, patterns fall out that you'd never have remembered on your own - which resort always had the brutal queues, where the on-mountain food was actually worth the money, whether you really do ski better on cold clear days or just think you do. A pile of GPS tracks quietly becomes something closer to an opinionated diary.

Keep the whole thing small enough to sustain

Here's the part the title promises - actually sticking with it. And the honest answer is that you stick with a journal by making the daily cost almost nothing.

Add up the whole system and it's tiny: charge the phone the night before, one tap at the first lift, a couple of memory photos over the day, twenty seconds to rate it that evening. That's it. There's deliberately no step where you sit down and "write up" the day, because that's exactly the step everyone abandons by January. The tracking, the photos and the rating are all things you can do without breaking stride - and the journal builds itself out of them.

The journal you actually keep will always beat the perfect one you meant to keep. Aim for complete rather than impressive, keep each day's effort small enough that you never have to talk yourself into it, and let the season add up on its own. Come April, you'll have the whole winter to scroll back through - grey Tuesdays and all.