How I Organize My Daily Life With Google Sheets & Only Track Metrics That Matter (To Me)
And keep a grip on what I find important
The perfect life organizer doesn’t exist.
Although you can take a template someone made, you usually still have to tweak it to work for you.
After years of experimenting with apps and tools (and ditching them again), here’s what my customized life organizer in Google Sheets looks like.
Hopefully, this walkthrough will give you ideas or inspiration on how you could set up your own life organizer using something as simple as a spreadsheet.
Other tools I use
My preferred stack looks something like this:
- Google Sheets (what this article is about)
- Placker, a Trello power-up to manage two boards with my main side projects (writing and YouTube)
- Google Calendar (to log tracked time in Toggl as calendar events)
- And Notion (as a second brain).
Dance
Let’s start with the first tab in my Google Sheets life organizer: ‘Dance.’
Each time I take a dance class, I log when and how it went in my ‘Dance’ tab.
I want to work on one tiny thing each time. I can’t rely on memory, so I jot my thoughts down here.
The ‘Dashboard’ tab shows the total number of classes I’m taking this year on a scorecard, as well as other metrics.
Writing
I track each Medium article on my ‘Writing’ tab.
I fill out each row manually with the date, draft URL for faster access, and the title. Once I’m done with editing and the piece is ready for publishing, I update the other fields, including:
- Final title
- Total number of words
- Topics
- Publication I submitted the story to (unless self-published)
On the Dashboard tab, I’ll see the most important metrics, including
- Total words written
- Total publication submissions (how many accepted vs. rejected?)
- Total unique publication submissions (how many different pubs did I pitch to?)
Habit tracking
After trying out several habit-tracking and to-do list apps, this is the only tool that stuck: a customized spreadsheet (that you can get for free here).
It took me a good 4+ years to get to consistently green streaks like those on the image above.
It’s a daily reminder of the bare minimum I want to do to fill my own cup and take care of my mental, physical, and emotional health.
Yearly calendar
Cat Mulvihill shared this colorful yearly tracker on LinkedIn. I integrated it into my organizer to keep a bird’s eye view of my calendar year.
Since I want to establish a video editing daily habit, I added the name of the video I worked on that day to the calendar.
Dashboard
The dashboard shows writing and dance metrics.
It also shows which Medium Topics I used on my blogs each month.
Job searching
After 4 years of freelancing on and off I’ve learned that… I strongly dislike it. I’m also not very good at it. Right now, it’s not what I need. It shoves me into panic mode too often. With an already dysregulated nervous system that I’m committed to healing, I don’t need extra stress.
Instead of continuing to lie to myself — as I’ve done for the past 2 years (at least) — I’m once looking for a job.
This spreadsheet helps me keep track of my applications.
Medium Publications
I linked the Publications column in my ‘Writing’ Tab to this ‘Publications’ tab.
Anytime I request to be a writer for a new Medium publication, I add their basic information to this spreadsheet.
I add the date of my request, so I’ll know if and when to follow up. Once they add me as a writer, I check the box in column H. Once this box is checked, I can select this publication from a dropdown menu in the Writing tab.
Headlines
Ayodeji Awosika once sent out this Headline Plug & Play template as a freebie.
I keep it in my Organizer in case I run out of topics to write about, or need help coming up with a headline.
URLs
In the URLs tab, I manually add URLs I will reuse often, plus a Bitly link (if I made one).
Bitly allows you to shorten URLs, create QR codes and Link-in-bio pages — and track every click or scan.
Growth statistics
On the 1st of every month, I’ll manually update this spreadsheet to see how I did.
Final thoughts
This Google Sheet is a mash-up of multiple Google Sheets I made over the years. You can steal these templates for free in the Google Sheets Geeks publication.
Be willing to experiment, with apps, software, paper methods, or stickie notes. But stick to something once you notice it works and you feel comfortable with it.
There’s no need to switch to an app only because it’s new and it looks cute if your spreadsheet is already doing the job — and doing it well.
