A spreadsheet, four rules, and why I gave up on apps

This is the about page, in the sense that the method is the only thing about me worth describing. I do not use my name here because the sheet is about behaviour rather than about a person, and because I would write less honestly with it attached.

The four rules

1. Fill it in at the same moment every day. Mine is while the kettle boils in the morning, for the day before. A fixed moment beats a reminder every time.
2. A missed day stays blank. No backfilling from memory. A blank is information; a guess is contamination.
3. Never change a past cell. If I was wrong, the correction goes in the note at the bottom of the month, not over the top of the original.
4. Read it monthly or stop keeping it. A sheet nobody reads is a chore with a spreadsheet attached.

Why not an app

I used three over about eighteen months. Each was pleasant and each failed in the same way: the data was easy to put in and hard to look at. Two of them wanted to show me a weekly ring or a score rather than the rows, and one lost eleven weeks in a migration which is when I stopped.

What I wanted	Spreadsheet	Apps I tried
See a whole year at once	Yes	None of them
Add a column in ten seconds	Yes	One of three
Write a paragraph at the foot of a month	Yes	None of them
Own the file	Yes	One of three
Nag me	No, thankfully	All of them

The physical part

One sheet per year, one row per day, frozen header, no formulas except a count at the top of each column. No conditional formatting — I tried red-and-green and found I was optimising for green, which is exactly the failure the strength target entry is about.

Backups, since someone always asks

A copy on a memory stick in a drawer, replaced each January when the new sheet starts. That is it. Four years, one copy, and losing it would upset me more than it should.