Before buying a goal app, it's worth knowing that a spreadsheet does most of the job.
Not as a joke, and not as a minimum viable version. A sheet with five columns handles the substance of what most goal tracking involves, and it has properties no product can match.
What five columns gets you
Goal, last touched, days since, state, note.
The third column is a formula — today's date minus the second — and it recalculates every time you open the file. That's the entire mechanism of gap tracking, in one cell, and it's a fifteen-second setup.
The fourth is a conditional: under four days, four to seven, eight or more. Also a formula, and it gives you the same three states most goal apps offer.
Sort by column three, descending, and the thing you've neglected longest is at the top. That's automatic ordering, which is the property most personal lists lack and the one that does the most work.
Add a second sheet for notes — date, goal, one line — and you have a log you can filter by goal and read back in a sitting.
That's not an approximation of a goal system. It's most of one.
What's striking, having built it, is how little the missing part is. There's no clever algorithm in gap tracking — it's a subtraction. Any product in this space is competing on the friction around that subtraction rather than on the idea itself, which is worth knowing before anyone pays for one.
The properties nothing else has
Four, and they're the reason the option deserves taking seriously.
It will open in fifteen years. Spreadsheet formats are among the most durable things in computing, and a personal record is worth most when it's long-lived — a length of time over which products get acquired, pivot, or shut down.
It's yours. A file on your machine, exportable, readable, movable, with no account, no subscription, and nobody's terms to accept.
It bends to your situation. Every goal app makes assumptions about what a goal is. A sheet makes none. If your work needs a column for who you're waiting on and a column for the date you'll escalate, you add two columns.
It costs nothing. No monthly fee, and no lock-in to defend later.
What it doesn't do
The honest side, and the reasons people don't stay with them.
Friction on the phone. Editing a spreadsheet on a phone is unpleasant enough that it doesn't happen, and a log only works if writing a line takes ten seconds. That's the single biggest reason spreadsheet systems lapse — not that they don't work, but that they aren't there at the moment you'd use them.
Maintenance you have to remember. The date column only updates if you update it. Every app that does this fills the field automatically when you write a note, and that small automation is the difference between a system that stays true and one that quietly goes stale by March.
No prompting. The sheet doesn't put itself in front of you. Whatever brings you back to it has to come from somewhere else, and for a lot of people it doesn't come at all.
It looks like work. This one is unserious and real. Opening a spreadsheet to write a line about how you're avoiding your book has a different feeling from opening something designed for the purpose, and feelings determine whether things get used.
Who should use one
Straightforwardly: anyone who wants the mechanism without the product.
If you're comfortable in a sheet, mostly at a desk, and would rather own the file than rent access to a service, this is a genuinely good answer and you shouldn't feel you're settling for less.
It's also the right first move if you're not sure the whole idea works for you. Fifteen minutes and no commitment tells you whether measuring gaps changes anything, which is worth knowing before adopting anything.
Two cases where a purpose-built thing earns its place.
If you'd be logging from a phone, in the moment, after a session — the friction kills it. The value of a log is entirely in whether the line gets written, and a spreadsheet on a phone is where lines go to not be written.
And if you need the date to maintain itself. Any system where a human has to remember to update a timestamp will drift, and the drift is invisible: the column says fourteen days when it's really been forty, and the number is now worse than useless because it's confidently wrong.
What this says about the category
If a spreadsheet does eighty per cent of it, that's a reasonable thing for a product in this space to admit.
What a purpose-built tool adds is a short list of unglamorous things: the date fills itself when you write a note, it works on a phone, the ordering can't be overridden, and the state is calculated rather than maintained. That's the twenty per cent, and it's the twenty per cent that determines whether the system is still accurate in September.
What it shouldn't add is everything else — streaks, points, percentages, folders, an account you didn't ask for. Those aren't the missing twenty per cent. They're the reason so many people go back to a spreadsheet.
Try the sheet first
Five columns, fifteen minutes, and it costs nothing to find out.
If it holds up for two months, you've saved yourself a subscription. If it goes stale in three weeks because updating a date column by hand is one step too many on a Tuesday night, you've learned something specific about what you need from a tool — which is a much better basis for choosing one than a feature list.
Either outcome is a good one. The bad outcome is adopting something with a monthly fee before knowing whether the underlying idea does anything for you, which is a decision a spreadsheet can answer for free.
Related: Local-first software, explained · What we left out of goaldrift, and why · Logging beats tracking
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