Whether you are practicing magic for practical results or for spiritual communion or a combination of the two, its important to keep track of your results, as well as keep track of the variables that potentially effect your magical working. The reason tracking this information is so important is that it can help you determine how effective your magical workings are, as well as what variables need to be accounted for. And in some situations it also helps you determine what you've missed in previous workings so that you can refine them in the future. Recently a friend shared with me some magical work he was doing. I asked him to break the working down into a process he could track, and list all the variables associated with that process. By taking such an approach, my friend was able to discover a lot about the magical workings he was doing that he hadn't accounted for or tracked. It's not enough to track your result, though that can be helpful. It's important to track every aspect of the working so that you can fully understand what is going into it. When a magical working goes unexamined, what it presents is a lack of awareness that allows variables into play that could be accounted for otherwise. Those variables will change the efficacy of the working because they aren't unaccounted for. Tracking what you do, on the other hand, enables you to anticipate and plan for those variables, even making them part of the magical working, as opposed to something that distracts you.
When you can't account for what you are doing or have done, that lack of accounting even becomes a variable that effects your magical working. What is not tracked becomes resistance or pushes your working into a different direction than what you seek out. Typically the reason a magical working goes unexamined is for one of two reasons. The first reason is the lack of discipline on the part of the magician. The magician may explain it away as letting the magic do its work, but what this explanation is a lack of rigor on the part of the magician and an unwillingness to examine their magical work to determine if its even working. The second reason is because the magician hasn't been trained to track their magical work. They don't keep a journal to examine their magical work. In either case, starting to track their magical work will help the magician learn more about magic and what is or isn't working in what they are doing.
To track your magical work, first focus on defining the result. Then define the process that will help you achieve the result. Write out each step and account for the variables that influence each step. By doing this you'll develop an understanding of what you are actually doing. You won't simply be doing a ritual, but rather you'll be doing the ritual and understanding how that ritual ought to connect to the world at large to generate the result you are seeking.