The Spreadsheet Maren Made Me Start

Maren started the spreadsheet, not me, which surprises people who assume the guy who writes inspection reports for a living would naturally be the one keeping the ledger. The truth is I used to just remember things, or half remember them, until she got tired of me confidently misremembering whether I’d given something a 3 or a 4 six months after finishing it and just built the thing herself one evening and handed it to me.

It’s not complicated. Title, kind, date finished, rating, a one-line verdict, and what I actually paid for it, six columns, nothing fancy. But having the price-paid column sitting right next to the rating column changed how I think about both. A 3 star game that cost me sixty dollars reads differently on the page than a 3 star game that cost twelve, even though the actual experience playing them was equally fine, and seeing that side by side made me realize how much of my gut reaction to a purchase was really about value math I hadn’t been doing consciously.

The date-finished column is the one that’s quietly saved me the most grief. Before the spreadsheet, I’d occasionally start writing a review for something and realize halfway through I was conflating two different plays of the same game from different points in a campaign, or misremembering which book I’d actually finished versus which one I’d just gotten deep into and set aside. Now there’s a date, unambiguous, and I check it before I write a single sentence.

Dale finds the whole thing very funny, mostly because he knows exactly how much it resembles the actual work I do all day, another log, another set of columns, another discipline about writing things down accurately instead of trusting memory to hold the details straight. He’s not wrong that it’s a little on the nose. I’ve stopped being embarrassed about it. If keeping a boring, honest ledger is what it takes to make sure my ratings actually mean something six months later instead of drifting with whatever mood I finished the thing in, I’ll take the ribbing.

The one column I still haven’t added, and Maren keeps suggesting it, is a reread or replay column, tracking which of these I’ve actually gone back to versus which ones I rated highly once and never touched again. I suspect that column would tell an uncomfortable story about a few of my five-star ratings, which is probably exactly why I keep putting off adding it.