Almost 10 years ago, I read Getting Things Done for the first time. It showed me the importance of having a trusted system, a place for all of the things that you want to or have to do — be they personal, professional, or otherwise. That book is responsible for getting me excited about productivity tools and systems — an excitement that has been with me for my entire professional life.

Of course, systems and tools alone won’t make you more productive. I’ll be one of the first people to admit that. However, if you’ve got the basic discipline and desire to get organized and productive, a good tool can be a determining factor in keeping you on your game.

For me, that system has been GTD. It’s not perfect — no system is. But it is fundamentally sound and, when I follow it, I feel much better about how and what I’m doing, both professionally and spiritually.

Since deciding to implement it in my life, I’ve gone through several pieces of software in search of that perfect program to follow the GTD framework. I tried ToodleDo, Wunderlist, Todoist, Trello, Evernote, Buckets, Any.do, Remember the Milk, and a few more that I’ve forgotten by now. In some way, each of them missed the mark for me. They were either too rigid, too complicated, clunky, or a mixture of those shortcomings.

Recently, I stumbled into a most unlikely piece of software to implement my kind of GTD system: Google Sheets. And you know what? I really, really like it. Who would have thought a simple web-based spreadsheet program could run a totally rad implementation of GTD?

Actually, now that I think of it, that should have been one of the first apps I tried. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. But more on that as I run down just how I use it. So without further ado: here’s how and why Google Sheets kicks some serious butt when it comes to productivity.

Why Google Sheets is so Great as a Productivity App

1. Visual Consolidation = Better Mental Processing

Clutter is a real problem — be it physical or digital — with real psychological effects. Among them are efficiency drains and lower effectiveness in processing information. Not to mention lower subjective well-being. When I look at a list of projects and it takes up a lot of space and has a lot of text and other stuff attached to it, I can feel my mind checking out. I can feel my efficiency and will to work fall away.

Google sheets is just rows and columns, and as few or as many of those as I like. So when I have 35 or so open projects at once, it’s helpful to just see those as rows on a spreadsheet, which is something I’m familiar with and which can present a lot of data in a neat and tidy format.

2. Ease of Entry, Ease of Change

A good productivity system is one that captures information easily. In order for that to happen, there needs to be few (if any) barriers to entering a project or task into the system, and few (if any) barriers to changing or adding information.

This is where spreadsheets really shine. Entering a new project or task is as easy as clicking a cell and typing in it. There are no checkboxes, options, buttons, or anything else — you just type as much or as little as you want, and there it is. If you feel like adding more information, you can add a column. You can merge cells. You can do damn near anything. As I built my particular system, I counted on being able to do just that. Productivity is very messy, it’s important to have a system that is able to accommodate that without demanding too much of the user initially. For me, a spreadsheet does that perfectly.

3. Agility

Any productivity system worth its salt needs to be agile enough to sort and filter based on changing priorities and criteria. A basic spreadsheet does just that. Google Sheets makes it pretty easy to create multiple filters based on different criteria.

Some people (especially those strictly following GTD) use contexts for each task. Each task has “@phone” or “@computer” or something similar to allow you to only look at tasks you can do based on your location or available tools. For those who use contexts in their productivity systems, the agility of filters in spreadsheets makes it that much easier to simply sort or filter based on the contexts to find the action items you need.

Google Sheets makes it easy to save custom filters with multiple criteria and sorts. You can name these filters as you wish, which will make them easier to use to find actions or projects based on what you’re looking for at a given time.

4. Simplicity and Power

Perhaps the underlying benefit of all the aforementioned ones for spreadsheets is that they are simple. And because they are simple, they are powerful. In a spreadsheet, data is put into simple order and associated with other data. That data can be something as complex as a formula that links several data points in a function, or as simple as text with no linkage or function whatsoever.

How you link all the data is up to you. And really, isn’t that how it works when you’re getting things done? You decide what gets linked up, where things go, and how they function. Shouldn’t your productivity system mirror that — at least at its most basic level? I tend to think so, hence my ending up on Google Sheets.

5. Cross-Platform Usage & The Cloud

All of the above things apply to any kind of spreadsheet — be it Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, OpenOffice Calc, or (to a slightly lesser extent) Apple Numbers. They’re all spreadsheet programs, and work off the same basic principles of rows, columns, sheets, and formulas. But Google Sheets is entirely on the Cloud, where it works robustly and reliably.

I work on 3 different devices, with 3 different operating systems: a Windows machine for my day job, a MacBook Air at home, and my iPhone 7. Anywhere I have an internet connection, I can get on a browser and work on my GTD workbook. And on the iOS Google Drive app, I can star files for offline viewing — which I do for my GTD workbook.

How I Use It

My Google Sheets workbook has 7 sheets in it — yes, 7. Each has its own purpose, and its own relationship to other tabs.