​I have an oddly clear picture of my 2018. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that I met 269 new people. I can tell you that my attention span usually wanes somewhere around 4 pm every afternoon. I can tell you that on March 28 I had "Silly Love Songs" stuck in my head, but on September 5 it was "SICKO MODE." And I can tell you I had eight crushes in January and another eight in February.

I can regurgitate these weird facts because in 2018 I diligently became best friends with a Google Sheet. At the end of 2017 I decided to try to quantify the parts of my life that sometimes seem to defy logic — desires, habits, dumb ideas for tattoos — and catalogue them until something made sense. And the only thing crazier than the fact that I actually managed to do it is that it actually worked.

The sheet has even helped me get my 2019 off to a better start — just the other day I ran into two people I met at the tail end of last year and used some info from my spreadsheet to skip smalltalk and jump into a real conversation right away. I plan on doing this all year. I am operating on a higher plane now. You can too.

What I Tracked

My spreadsheet, affectionately titled "Joey OS 2018", had 19 tabs, and not all of them really worked. But here are the ones I think everyone could benefit from tracking:

Expenses – Literally any time I swipe one my cards (or deposited money into an account) I made a note of it here. This is the first page on my sheet, and also the only one that makes use of any cool Google Sheets function magic.

People I've Met – This is the one that turns heads. Anytime I traded names with someone in person (or over the phone) I put their name down, along with the date, place I met them and a brief note of what we talked about or any important identifying characteristics. It's a great way to "remember" people's names, and it also helps you actually commit names and important information about new acquaintances to your natural memory.

Gifts – You know when someone tells you they want something or need something or lost something and you nod your head like a dummy and then six months later wonder what to get them for their birthday? Don't just nod your head like a dummy, write that thing they told you about here.

Songs Stuck In My Head – I think this is a nice way to take data on your emotions in an honest way. I also think I might get songs stuck in my head more frequently than the average person, so this might not work for absolutely everyone, but if it does can be a phenomenal mood tracker.

These categories are key, because between the four of them, I opened the sheet multiple times every day. A data collecting effort this large demands consistency, and if you have fields that will only be filled in every few days or weeks or so, you're going to end up forgetting to do it. I spend money and meet new people nearly every day (and I can prove that!) so using those things as an impetus to open the spreadsheet as often as possible helped me stay in it enough to also use other pages that were less important but still valuable to me.







Some of those pages I can't really recommend to everyone, because they were sort of hyperspecific to my life: clothes I want to buy, tattoo ideas I want to watch age (and perhaps decrease in desirability), restaurants I want to eat at in New York; girls I had crushes on, however short-lived; good first date ideas; and so on.

But since these are mainly lists of things that I want to keep top of mind, it was good to have them in one place I was checking often. When my dad visited my neighborhood in July and said he was hungry, I was able to point us to a restaurant I had heard great things about and had wanted to try instead of choking under pressure and turning to Yelp. We had a delicious pizza. It was great. The sheet works.

Joey OS 2018 also helped me greatly in one of the most important aspects of my year: therapy. I began the year in a really dark place, which is a big part of the reason I started the sheet and committed to it so strongly. I wanted to change my life, and keeping track of everything helped me understand what my life actually looked like. In 2018 I had six pages of my spreadsheet dedicated to things I talked about with my therapist or ideas that my therapist suggested I work on. Without those, I would have certainly gotten less out of my sessions and unquestionably had a harder time bringing the lessons I learned in therapy into my everyday life.

The sheet works.

What Did Not Work

I have a bunch of other pages that I used much less often, including Attention Span, which I updated for a week before ironically losing interest; Loops, which are essentially just "high thoughts"; a Reading List full of books I wanted to read but never did; and a Writing List full of projects I'll get to someday.

As good and valuable as this information might have been if I actually managed to collect enough to see meaningful trends, I was never going to do that. It's hard to note when you lose your attention span, because it's hard to notice when that happens at all, let alone also remember to open up a spreadsheet and write down the time. Reading a book takes a long time, and after I did so, I never felt compelled to jump into a spreadsheet and check it off. The same goes for knocking out a big writing project.

I'm not sure if the case is that these sorts of values are impossible to track in a spreadsheet or simple a little harder than others, maybe I'll find out in 2019. Maybe you will.

What I Recommend For You And Myself In 2019

Download a spreadsheet app to your phone (Google Sheets works for me, but I imagine there are others that would also be great) for maximum accessibility. If you have a spare 5 minutes and you have something to jot down, you want to be able to do that no matter where you are. I probably spend about 15 minutes per day updating my sheet, and I think you could probably see meaningful results from an even lighter commitment than that.

It's good to write things down: movies you watch, alcohol you drink, cans of cat food your cat eats, first dates you go on, naps you take, etc. A lot of the time the only data I find myself writing down is, "Hey, I did this thing," which is fine. But for even the most barebones spreadsheet, I recommend having a "date" and "notes" column to establish a sort of baseline for data collection. That way you can note trends in frequency and correlation with time of year and day of the week, while also holding yourself accountable to the sheet itself. There's nothing that motivates you to type into a cell like seeing that the last time you updated your "Running" sheet was 3 months ago.







Also "notes" is a great field because while sometimes you don't have anything to say about a thing, you'll often find little qualitative ramblings to include that you didn't even know you thought, and you'll remember them. I think in general it makes my natural memory feel a little more full.

Finally, make your spreadsheet a positive experience. Be careful to use this as a tool, as opposed to a weapon against yourself. "Joey OS 2019" has a page called "Things I Want To Be." When I first started 2018, the only thing I wanted to be was Not Depressed. Now, I want to be a lot of things, and all of them are positive. I want to be a good writer, I want to be a kind friend, I want to be a loving son. I also want to be more disciplined and a better "Super Smash Bros." player.

If you want this to help you change your life for the better, your OS should not be an avenue for admonishing yourself. Instead, allow it to help you organize the messier parts of your brain, shed light on the murky ones, and help you shift the best stuff to center stage. Make your operating system a window into the complicated things that make you human, understand those things, and figure out how to fit them into your plan on becoming the human you want to be. This is the way I did that last year and it could be the thing that helps you do it this year. I promise: the sheet works.

Anyway, after that moment of earnestness, allow me to roast myself by embedding a playlist made up of all the songs that got stuck in my head in 2018: