I tracked my life in Excel for 3 months—I’m never using a journaling app again

Published May 15, 2026, 10:45 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. Journaling always made sense to me in theory—a running record of your life that you could actually reference and learn from. However, I never got that experience from traditional journaling because text entries don’t magically connect themselves. Spotting a pattern between last Tuesday and something that happened three months ago means you already have to suspect the connection exists. Microsoft Excel turned out to be the format that finally fixed this for me and gave me the journaling experience I’d been chasing for years. Why I use Excel and not a journaling app Because ‘numbers’ are more honest than ‘feelings’ Journaling apps are built for writing. They’re optimized for text entry, with some even adding features like mood stamps and photo attachments. It’s a great way to record how you feel, but not necessarily the best way to retrieve meaningful insights later. I can’t just ask my journal questions like: Do I actually work better after a good night’s sleep? Does gaming tank my productivity, or does it just feel that way? Do I spend more money ordering in or eating out? My journal would obviously contain that data, but there’s no easy way to surface it instantly. You’d have to jump between entries, read through them, and then draw your own conclusions. Sure, some “modern” journaling apps are adding AI features to help uncover these hidden patterns, but I don’t want an AI parsing through my private, intimate details. After putting up with that inconvenience for years, I eventually had the idea of using Excel to journal my life. Spreadsheets give you structured, queryable data. Every day becomes a row. Every metric you want to track becomes a column. Once you have a few weeks of data, you can start spotting correlations—not by trying to remember patterns, but by seeing them directly. There’s also the privacy aspect. Yes, I’m using Microsoft Excel for this demonstration, but you could use any spreadsheet app you want—including fully offline options like LibreOffice Calc. You don’t have to worry about recurring subscriptions or cloud lock-in. You can store everything as a CSV or XLSX file, and it stays on your machine completely offline. The other thing that surprised me was how much faster it is than traditional journaling. The whole process takes about two minutes, since you’re not writing—you’re just selecting dropdowns and entering numbers, it becomes as routine as brushing your teeth. Related What I track in my journaling spreadsheet I was surprised to see my life neatly fit into 22 columns There’s no hard-and-fast rule here. You basically need to ask yourself which metrics matter to you and what kind of data you want to track over time. Just like a traditional journal can’t realistically be a detailed 24-hour log of your entire day—you pick and choose what matters—the spreadsheet also needs limits to stay manageable. It should focus only on the things that are actually important to you. For me, that ended up being 22 metrics across the following eight categories: Emotions: Mood (happy or sad), stress, and energy levels Sleep: Sleep duration, sleep quality, wake-up time, and bedtime Physical Health: Exercise intensity, body weight, and sickness Wellness Habits: Meditation (yes or no), morning sunlight, outdoor time, water intake, coffee intake, and junk food intake Productivity: Deep work hours and personal project hours Time Use: Reading, gaming, phone screen time, and multimedia consumption Social: Social interactions and helping strangers Finances: Daily spending How the setup works I designed the Excel file to capture journal entries for an entire year. However, a single sheet with 365 rows would become unwieldy pretty quickly. So I divided it into 12 tabs—one for each month—along with a “Legend” tab that explains all the metrics. There’s also a Master tab that automatically pulls data from all 12 monthly tabs using cross-sheet formulas. You never interact with it directly—it just updates automatically as you fill out each month and gives you one comprehensive dataset whenever you need it. Within the monthly tabs, the days occupy the rows while the metrics occupy the columns. I found that layout more useful because I log everything on an ultrawide monitor. If you plan to enter data primarily from your phone, though, flipping the rows and columns would probably make more sense. As for the actual data-entry workflow, each category is optimized for speed. Wherever possible, I use dropdown menus. Mood is either Happy or Sad. Sickness is Healthy or Sick. Exercise intensity is None, Low, Mild, or Intense. Wellness fields like Meditation, Morning Sunlight, and Water Goal are all simple Y/N entries. You rarely have to type anything manually—you just select from a list. Score-based fields like Stress (0–5) and Energy (1–5) also use dropdowns, so those are quick to fill out as well. Numeric fields like Body Weight, Coffee Cups, and Total Spending accept direct number input, with soft validation rules that warn you if something looks unrealistic or incorrect. Wait—isn’t this just habit tracking? This Excel spreadsheet is more like a habit tracker and journal combined On the surface, logging numbers and selecting dropdowns every day does look more like habit tracking than journaling. But here’s the difference—a typical habit-tracking app only lets you log data. What makes this different is that it’s Excel. You’re not just limited to punching numbers into a cell, you can also attach comments (and notes) to those cells. Those comments become the explanation behind the data—the missing journaling component, if you will. For example, on most days, you’d simply log your sleep quality and move on. There’s usually no reason to write a paragraph explaining why you slept poorly. Most of the time, the raw data is enough. But sometimes something unusual happens. Maybe there was a power outage. Maybe a stray cat spent the entire night meowing outside your window. On days like that, you can leave a comment explaining what happened. That means you’re not just collecting raw numbers—you’re also preserving the narrative behind them whenever it actually matters. A traditional habit tracker won’t give you meaningful context. A traditional journal won’t help you identify patterns at scale. But Excel lets you combine both approaches, and that’s what makes the system so useful. Related This is why you’d use Excel in the first place Most people who use Excel already know you can throw together a bar chart or pie chart to get a rough visual dashboard. That works fine, but I took things a step further for this project. Microsoft 365 Personal OS Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android Brand Microsoft Price $100/year Developer(s) Microsoft Free trial 1 month Microsoft 365 includes access to Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on up to five devices, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and more. I used Claude to help me vibe-code an offline HTML dashboard that visualizes all the data using relevant charts and graphs. All I have to do is export the month’s data as a CSV file, upload it into the dashboard, and it transforms everything into clean visualizations. Yes, I used AI to help create the dashboard, but it works completely offline. I’m not feeding my personal data into any AI service. The dashboard exists as a single HTML file stored locally on my machine. I configured it to display 13 correlations across the eight categories that mattered most to me. That includes things like: Sleep quality vs. next-day productivity Screen time vs. deep work hours Stress levels lagged by seven days compared against sick days Social interaction frequency vs. mood Outdoor time and junk food intake compared against daily spending Related 5 chart types you should never use in Excel (and what to use instead) Common Excel visuals like pies, 3D charts, and dual axes often mislead more than they clarify data. Time to make your journal more insightful I’m sharing the Excel template in case you want to start with the same system I’m using. It already includes all the dropdown menus, validation rules, the Master tab, and three months of dummy data, so you can explore how everything works before you start logging your own entries.