Using a Simple Spreadsheet to Organize Your Writing
By: Mary Devries
Tags: Writing, Self Improvement, Organization, Entrepreneurship, Life

Using a Simple Spreadsheet to Organize Your Writing

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash

If you are like me, you want the bulk of your productive time to go towards writing excellent content and building a reader base. That’s what matters if you want to grow as a writer. But there comes a point fairly early on where you find yourself wasting a fair bit of time just trying to keep track of what you‘ve already done.

My personal tipping point was when I realized I was regularly spending precious time scrolling through all the comments I had left for other writers trying to find links to my stories under the published tab. There had to be a better way.

Why a spreadsheet?

I decided to use a spreadsheet to get organized because I love the flexibility of designing something that gathers just the information I want to keep track of and lets me look at it and analyze it easily.

The perfect spreadsheet for you will not look like my spreadsheet because you are not me. I’m going to share the nitty-gritty here so that you can learn from my thought process as well as my end product and hopefully glean a few tips that are useful to you.

I chose to use google sheets because I like to keep my spreadsheet open as a tab while I’m working. It’s free and has a clean easy interface that does everything I need it to do.

I love the fact that I can have different sheets in the same document. That lets me quickly and easily track different chunks of info separately without creating a complicated document. I am completely self-taught in spreadsheet usage so I don’t want to get too fancy.

Published Stories

Screenshot by author

Here is the landing page of my spreadsheet. Notice the tabs at the bottom. I use those to toggle between the different parts of my document.

This is the sheet where I list every story I have published on Medium. I include the bare minimum of useful information here. While it would be nice to have Medium stats page info like reads and earnings, those numbers change constantly so it’s better to just look on Medium for that when I want it. I need to keep my spreadsheet simple enough that I’m willing to keep up with it and complex enough to be useful.

The first column is the plain title. Next is the link. This data is what necessitated the spreadsheet in the first place. I wanted a quick way to find URLs for my stories so it was easy to link to old stories from new ones or share a link on Twitter to a trending hashtag.

Next is the date of publication. I find sorting things in reverse order to be most helpful. Following the date is the publication the story is in and then whether the story received that hotly desired, “Chosen for further distribution” nod from Medium.

The beauty of a spreadsheet is I can sort by any column simply by clicking on it and choosing a sort method. If I’m sitting on a story that could fit more than one publication I might sort by publications so I can quickly glance at how long it has been since I last published in various places.

Sorting by curation helps me reflect on which stories got picked up and which didn’t.

Submitted Stories

Screenshot by author

The next sheet is where I track stories I’ve submitted to a publication. Right now I have two that I waiting to hear back from. Note that there is space for listing the next publication and date submitted. If a story gets rejected from the first publication I’ll list the next one submitted to here.

This page is great because I can see how long a story has been sitting somewhere. Many publications, particularly if you haven’t published there before won’t let you know that your story has been rejected. The date lets me know when it is time to try somewhere else or self publish.

As soon as a story gets published I remove it from this sheet.

Goals

Screenshot by author

I thought it might be fun to keep track of when I reach certain milestones. I’m getting really close to the $5 mark but haven’t made it yet. I actually blew by the 20 fans for one story awhile back and didn’t even notice it. I rarely look at this sheet or update it so chances are high it will eventually wither and die.

Which is fine. A good spreadsheet is an evolving document. What you think will be useful might not be. It might turn out to be too much hassle to track so you don’t bother. Or it may have been important to you once but you grow past it. Do only what is helpful for you.

Publications

Screenshot by author

This is the original sheet that I started with. I don’t really use this one anymore but I’m sharing it with you because it was useful to me once.

When I was first starting out I needed a way to keep track of what publications I had requested to add me as a writer and especially so if I had sent in a draft link with the request.

For more advice on getting added to publications check out my story here. Note that I used the first sheet of my spreadsheet doc, “published stories” to quickly find the URL I needed to add the link to the previous sentence.

I started tracking my writer status and submission details here. It worked well at first but as I added more publications, and especially more story submissions it got unwieldy for me and I essentially split the information I wanted from here into the published stories and submitted stories sheets.

As I stated above, one beauty of a spreadsheet is that is a living document. Tweaking things as your needs change is a good idea.

I keep this page because it has some small value in showing me publications I have applied to and from which I have not heard back.

Followers

Screenshot by author

I was curious how quickly I was picking up followers so I created a sheet for that as well. Each morning I check my follower count and add it in here. I have formulas that calculate the daily increase, percent change, and the running 7-day average. This is purely for fun.

Final Tips

There you have it. My spreadsheet system for keeping track of the data I don’t find it easy to keep track of in Medium itself. If you find any of it useful, great! If you would like to use my entire system as a template to start from comment here with an email address and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

As you create a system that works for you I recommend you keep the following in mind:

KISS , keep it simple stupid. If it isn’t easy to use and keep up to date you won’t use it making the whole exercise worthless.

, keep it simple stupid. If it isn’t easy to use and keep up to date you won’t use it making the whole exercise worthless. Don’t waste time on fancy formatting unless that is something that brings you joy. Note the screenshot for my published stories page. The fonts, colors, and sizes are all over the place. This bugs me a little bit but not enough to take time away from writing and reading to want to change it. I had to seriously resist the impulse to clean it up before screenshotting it for you but I wanted to be authentic.

unless that is something that brings you joy. Note the screenshot for my published stories page. The fonts, colors, and sizes are all over the place. This bugs me a little bit but not enough to take time away from writing and reading to want to change it. I had to seriously resist the impulse to clean it up before screenshotting it for you but I wanted to be authentic. Track what matters to you not what you think you should track.

not what you think you should track. Tweak things regularly to meet your needs at the moment. If something is no longer useful don’t feel guilty about no longer updating it.

Good luck and happy creating!