2026-08-09

The Spreadsheet First

Before any tool, a sheet. Not because tools are bad, but because a sheet makes you decide what is worth recording, and a tool decides that for you before you know the answer.

What the sheet is

One row per release, nine columns, filled at two moments.

That is it. No integrations, no automation, no subscription, and it works identically in any spreadsheet application on any device you already own. A related workplace perspective is covered in Monitask’s online timesheets.

Why it beats a tool at the start

It forces the decision. Adding a column means deciding the number matters. A tool arrives with forty metrics and no opinion, and forty metrics recorded is the same as none. For additional current music-industry context, see Metacritic Music.

It is complete. A sheet holds platform numbers, money and hours in the same place, and no tool joins those three because the causal chain crosses systems.

It survives everything. Distributor changes, platform changes, a tool being discontinued. The file is yours and it will open in twenty years.

And it costs nothing to abandon. A subscription creates pressure to keep using something whether or not it helps.

The failure mode of tools at this stage

A subscription and a habit of not looking at it.

Onboarding is enthusiastic, the dashboard is populated, and three months later nobody opens it — because the numbers it shows were chosen by the vendor and none of them answered a question anybody had.

The sheet fails differently: if you stop filling it, you notice immediately, because the row is blank.

When to move to a tool

When a specific repeated task is consuming time a tool would remove.

Not when the sheet feels crude. Crude is a feature at three releases.

Time tracking is the first honest candidate, because recording hours by hand across a day genuinely is tedious and a timer is not.

Everything else can wait until you can name the task, the time it takes, and what the tool would do instead.

The three columns that matter most

If nine is too many to start.

Date. Hours. Income.

Three columns, two entries, and it already answers the question that decides everything else. Everything beyond these three is refinement.

Start with three, add the others when you find yourself wanting them — which is the opposite of how tools are adopted and the reason the sheet gets kept.

The short version