How I Track Everything I Watch, Read, and Play in Google Sheets

← Back to Blog

I track a lot of things. Books, movies, TV shows, video games, music albums, board games, wine. At this point, if it can be logged, I'm probably logging it somewhere.

For a while, I was spread across five or six different apps. Goodreads for books. Letterboxd for movies. Backloggd for games. Vivino for wine. Each one had its own account, its own UI, its own quirks. My data was scattered across platforms I didn't control, and I couldn't see any of it in one place.

So I moved everything into Google Sheets. This is how it works.

The problem with dedicated apps

I don't have anything against Goodreads or Letterboxd. They're fine. But after using them for years, a few things started bothering me:

• Data silos. My reading data lived in Goodreads. My movie data lived in Letterboxd. There was no way to see "what did I do this month?" across hobbies.
• No real analytics. Most of these apps give you a basic yearly summary. I wanted monthly breakdowns, genre distributions, rating trends.
• Privacy trade-offs. Social features I never asked for. Algorithms recommending things based on my activity. My reading history being public by default.
• Platform risk. Apps get acquired, shut down, or pivot. I've lost data before when a service went offline. I don't want that to happen with years of tracking history.

Why Google Sheets

Partly because I already use it every day – it's always open in a browser tab, it works on my phone, it syncs automatically. But mostly because a spreadsheet gives me full control over my data and how I see it. I can add whatever columns I want, build whatever charts I need and export to CSV if I ever want to move somewhere else. No API limits, no premium tiers, no algorithms.

Google Sheets also has surprisingly good charting and formula support. QUERY, FILTER, ARRAYFORMULA, SPARKLINE – there's enough built-in power to build a real dashboard without touching any code.

My setup

I use a set of SheetFlux trackers. Each one is a standalone Google Sheet with the same structure: a Library where I enter data, a Dashboard with KPI cards and a monthly activity chart and an Insights page with 8+ charts covering genres, ratings, monthly breakdowns and more.

What I use:

• 📚 ReadFlux – for books. Tracks title, author, genre, pages, dates started and finished, status, rating.
• 🎬 WatchFlux – for movies and TV shows. Tracks title, director, genre, type (movie vs. series), watch date, rating.
• 🎮 PlayFlux – for video games. Tracks title, platform, genre, playtime, status, rating.
• 🎲 BoardFlux – for board games. Tracks collection, plays, players, scores, cost-per-play stats.
• 🎧 ListenFlux – for music albums. Tracks artist, album, genre, label, listen date, rating.
• 🍷 TasteFlux – for drinks. Wine, beer, spirits, cocktails. Tracks type, style, country, price, tasting notes, rating.

Each one costs $12 individually, or there's a Complete Bundle for $45 that includes all 6.

What I actually see when I open a tracker

The first tab is always the Dashboard. It shows KPI cards for the current year – things like "books finished this year," "average rating," "pages read" and a progress bar toward my yearly goal. Below the cards, there's a monthly activity chart that shows which months I was most active.

The Insights tab goes deeper. It has charts for genre distribution, rating breakdown, monthly trends and a few others that are specific to each tracker. In ReadFlux, for example, there's a chart showing pages per month. In WatchFlux, there's one for movies vs. TV shows.

All of it updates automatically. I don't build charts or write formulas. I just add entries to the Library, and the dashboards reflect it.

The part I like most

I add a row, pick from dropdowns, and the date auto-fills. Status changes trigger a little toast notification and the Dashboard numbers update on their own.

There's no friction. I don't need to open a separate app, wait for it to load, search for a title, deal with a social feed I don't care about. It's just a spreadsheet. I type, I pick, I move on.

Year-end review

At the end of each year, I flip through my trackers and get a complete picture of how I spent my free time. How many books did I finish? What was my most-watched genre? Did I actually play through any of those games in my backlog?

Each tracker has a year filter in Settings, so I can look at any previous year too. I can compare 2025 to 2024. I can see whether I read more fiction or non-fiction. Whether I spent more on wine in the summer or winter.

I've stuck with this setup for over a year, which is more than I can say for any app.

It won't win any design awards next to something like Letterboxd. But it gives me more data, more control and way more privacy than any app I've tried. And it all lives in my Google Drive, where it'll stay whether or not some startup decides to pivot.