I’m not accountant, I don’t financially analyzing anything besides my personal budget, and I have almost no occasion in my work to ever use one, but I get excited about pretty much any time I can think of a use for a spreadsheet. There’s a lot of times where a spreadsheet can replace an app made to do the same thing. A lot of the time the spreadsheet will be even better, because it’ll be customized to just the fields you need. Plus Numbers/Google/Office all sync now – which isn’t at all a given with apps. And if something I’m tracking becomes cumbersome with a spreadsheet, it could turn into a great proof of concept for my next app.
Let me give some examples.
Sleep Journal
As I wrote about in my last post, I’m currently in the process of trying to fix my sleep schedule and become more of a morning person. The way I’m tracking that is with a Fitbit Flex I wear to bed and a spreadsheet that I keep in Numbers. Fitbit tracks most the data I need, but not everything (what time I put on my blue blocking glasses and misc notes). Also, leaving that data locked into Fitbit doesn’t help me if I want to analyze my habits overtime with charts, or if I want to share that data (in a future blog post, for example).
Commute Journal
To get from my apartment in the Sunset District (also known as Mars) to downtown San Francisco and back, there’s a few routes I can take, and I’d like to know which one is the best. What I’ve started doing is tracking my trips by using the iOS clock app and marking laps at points I want to track (when I get on/off public transit). This way I can track the average time each route took, how much time I spent walking versus public transit, and maybe if there’s a way to combine those segments differently to cut a few minutes off my travel time.
Car MPG & Maintenance
I don’t currently have a car, but I do have an RV. I track what kind of mileage I’m getting, and also when there’s maintenance done. When you’re driving around in a 27 year old vehicle, it’s best to stay on top of these things. If I see my gas mileage tank, I start to think there might be something up, and I take it in to get looked at before anything gets too bad. I used to use the app Gas Cubby for the same thing, but since it stopped being updated, Numbers has done the job just as well.
