The Spreadsheet I Keep Instead of Trusting My Memory

I started the spreadsheet three years before I ever wrote a review anyone else would read. Four columns, title, date finished, a star rating out of five, and a notes field I mostly left blank because typing a real sentence into a tiny spreadsheet cell felt like more effort than it was worth. This site is basically that notes column finally getting room to breathe, and the spreadsheet is still running underneath it, quietly, the actual system of record even though nobody reads it but me.

The reason I started it is embarrassingly simple. I couldn’t keep track of what I’d actually thought about something a couple months after finishing it. I’d remember I read a book, I’d remember roughly whether I liked it, and the specific reasons why would already be gone, replaced by a fuzzy overall impression that wasn’t reliable enough to trust when someone asked me for a recommendation. My memory for plot beats and rules text is fine in the moment and useless in retrospect, which is a strange thing to discover about yourself only after several years of noticing the same gap over and over.

Math background probably explains part of why a spreadsheet was the first tool I reached for instead of, say, a journal or a stack of index cards. A blank cell bothers me the way an unlabeled part on the line bothers me at work. If I finish something and don’t log it within a day or two, I know from experience I won’t go back and do it properly later, I’ll just estimate, and an estimated star rating three weeks after the fact is worse than no rating at all in my opinion.

What surprised me once I started writing actual reviews for this site is how often the spreadsheet and the review disagree, at least a little. I’ll log something a four in the spreadsheet the week I finish it, purely gut reaction, and then sit down to actually write the review a month later and land on three stars instead, because the gap gave me enough distance to notice a flaw I was too charmed to register right away. I’ve started treating the spreadsheet number as a first draft and the published rating as the real one, which means I’m technically maintaining two slightly different opinions of everything I read and play, and I’ve made my peace with that.

It’s an ugly spreadsheet. No color coding, no formulas beyond a basic average at the bottom, nothing anyone else would want to look at. But it’s outlasted three different note-taking apps I tried to replace it with, and at this point I trust it more than I trust my own recall of a book I finished two months ago, which might say something a little sad about memory in general, or might just mean the spreadsheet is doing exactly the job I built it for.