Dump your messy personal life into a spreadsheet
How sheets, docs, and folders can help you make sense of your relationships (and yourself)
We often use organizational tools to manage our external lives: to track deadlines, goals, and tedious projects that require pivot tables and formulas. But for all the energy we put into charting our professional growth, our personal lives are often a swirling mess of feelings, thoughts, and relationships in need of definition — or at least reflection.
Forge’s new Guide to Google Drive contains tools and templates for everything from ranking your exes to talking to God. Want to spice up your sex life? There’s a Google Sheet for that. Host a virtual party? Here’s your doc. And of course, you’ll also find the usual suspects: spreadsheets for managing your time, staying on top of your finances, and starting a new writing project.
On the personal side of things, here are few of our favorite resources:
“The need to prioritize the people in your life who matter most has never been greater than in quarantine,” writes Lauren Larson in an essay about creating a Google Sheet to rank every relationship in her life. The Sheet organizes all of Larson’s contacts into tiers, beginning with critical family and lifelong friends (Tier 1) and ending with professional enemies (Tier 15).
Kyla Marshell began keeping track of positives, negatives, and “lessons learned” from each of her exes in a spreadsheet titled “Mens.” The exercise led to some surprising insights — like the fact that the phrase “lacked confidence to pursue his dreams” kept coming up in the Negatives column. Marshell writes: “Treat the Sheet like an oracle: Come with your curiosities and questions, even ones that seem too philosophical for the format.”
Prayer can be as simple as opening a Google doc and typing, explains Ashley Abramson. There’s something cathartic about starting a letter with “Dear God,” even if you never read it back to yourself. And as Ashley notes, “If God can read my thoughts, he can certainly hack into my Chromebook.”
For more tools and templates, head to Forge’s Guide to Google Drive.
