The same active ingredient does not always arrive in the same form. Semaglutide is supplied both as an injection and as a tablet taken by mouth, and NHS guidance describes both routes. The injection is typically given once a week; the tablet is taken every day. Liraglutide, a different ingredient in the same broad family, is injected once a day rather than once a week.
So the question of what to track is not really a question about which medicine you are on. It is a question about which of three rhythms your routine follows, because each one puts a different set of details at risk of being forgotten.
Three rhythms, not two
A weekly injection asks you to remember one event per week. It is a small number of events, which sounds easy and is often the opposite: there is no daily repetition to build the habit on, and a week is long enough that a shifted day passes without being noticed until you try to reconstruct it later.
A daily injection asks for the same small action every day, at roughly the same time. The habit tends to form faster, but the individual events blur together, and a specific day two months ago becomes almost impossible to recall unless it was written down at the time.
A daily tablet has the daily rhythm plus a set of conditions attached to when and how it is taken, which is the part that most often needs recording. Those conditions are where a tablet routine stops resembling an injection routine at all.
What a daily tablet routine asks you to record
Official patient information for the oral form sets out conditions around when the tablet is taken: what may be eaten or drunk near it, how it sits relative to other medicines taken by mouth, and that the tablet is swallowed whole. The particular times and quantities are printed in the leaflet inside your own pack, this page states none of them, and a pharmacist can work through them with you against everything else you take.
Every one of those conditions is a thing that can go differently on a real morning, and a thing a prescriber may reasonably ask about. That makes them worth logging, briefly, rather than assuming the routine went as intended.
- The time you took it, and whether that was your usual time or later than usual
- Whether you had eaten or drunk anything beforehand, and roughly when
- How long you actually waited before your first food, drink, or other medicine
- Any other medicines or supplements taken that morning, and when they went in relative to the tablet
- Days you missed entirely, marked as missed rather than left blank, so a gap in the log is unambiguous later
The gap between the tablet and whatever came next is the line people most often leave out and most often want later. Over a month, recording it turns a vague sense of having mostly got it right into something a clinician can read, and it does that without asking you to change anything about the routine itself.
What an injection routine asks for instead
None of the above applies. An injection routine puts its detail elsewhere, and a log built for one route is a poor fit for the other.
- The date of each injection, and the date you had planned it for if those differ
- The general site used, if you rotate between sites, so the record shows where the injections actually went
- Anything you noticed at the site afterwards, dated
- How the pen or pack has been stored, particularly around travel or unusually warm days
- Where you are in a pack, so a repeat prescription is not requested at the last moment
With a weekly rhythm the whole log can be one line a week. With a daily injection it is one line a day, and if you do record the site the entries accumulate far faster, since the skin sees many more punctures over a month than a weekly routine produces.
Symptom tracking changes shape too
People on a weekly injection often describe how they feel in relation to the days after a dose, because there is a single weekly event to measure against. That framing gives a natural structure to a symptom log: day one, day three, day six.
A daily routine has no such landmark. Every day contains the medicine, so there is nothing to compare a day against except other days, and the useful structure comes from ordinary anchors instead: meals, mornings and evenings, sleep, activity, and how a symptom relates to when you took the tablet or the injection rather than to a position in a cycle. Neither structure is better; they are answers to different questions, and using the weekly framing on a daily routine tends to produce a log where nothing correlates with anything.
Supply, travel, and paperwork
A tablet pack and an injection pack raise different practical questions. Tablets travel more simply and have their own storage instructions on the pack. Injections bring temperature, transport, and sharps considerations, and official storage instructions that are worth checking rather than assuming. In both cases the record that matters is the same in principle: what you have, how much is left, when it was dispensed, and when the next request needs to go in.
Whichever route you are on, the medication list that consumer guidance recommends should say not only the name of the medicine but how it is taken. Route and frequency are exactly the fields that get lost when a list is written from memory, and they are the fields that make the rest of the list interpretable.
What this page will not decide for you
It will not tell you whether a tablet or an injection is the better option, because that depends on your medical history, what treatment is for, what you are able to keep up, and clinical judgement about your situation. Government guidance asks people to consult a healthcare professional before switching between GLP-1 medicines, and says that switching without medical advice may increase the risk of experiencing side effects or make the treatment less effective. A change of route is a change of product, not a change of preference.
It also will not tell you what to do about a missed tablet or a missed injection. That depends on how long ago it was and on the specific product, both of which the leaflet inside your pack addresses and your pharmacist can confirm. Keeping a clear record simply means you can answer their first question accurately when you ask. If a symptom is severe or worsening quickly, seek urgent medical help rather than working through your log first.