I used to write practice notes in full sentences, and that was the reason I stopped writing them after four days. A sentence takes ten seconds, and in a short Counter-Strike 2 duel session ten seconds is enough to break the rhythm. So I invented a shorthand with a very small vocabulary: one word per duel, written in a plain text file next to the game.
The vocabulary
I keep six words. "Slow" means the opening of the duel felt later than usual. "Crisp" means everything happened when I expected it. "Early" and "late" describe where my first shot landed in time. "Wide" and "heavy" are about the crosshair: it drifted away from the target, or it felt hard to stop. If none of the six fits, I write a dash and move on.
The format
Each line has the word and the map, nothing else. The file looks like a column of tiny entries, and that is the point. I can write a line in about three seconds, even right after a duel I lost, and I never have to decide how to phrase it.
Reading the file
Once a week I scroll through the lines and look for patterns instead of single entries. One "heavy" means nothing. Seven "heavy" on one map suggests that the angle, the weapon or my chair was the issue that evening. Because the words are always the same, I can count them with my eyes.
Why one word works
A word forces a choice, and a choice is more honest than a paragraph written to sound sensible. It also prevents a trap I fell into often, which was explaining a bad duel to myself until it sounded like someone else's fault.
Where it fits
The shorthand is the small, always-available part of a wider habit, described in three notes worth writing after an update, where the author keeps only what differs from a normal evening. I use the six words for the daily lines and the three notes for the day after an update.