My Obsession with Spreadsheets

Among my many weakness is my love of a good spreadsheet.

There's something about putting data into an orderly fashion into little columns and rows in electronic format that just speaks to me. I love it. Maybe it's something about my job as a computer programmer or my database organizational training. But I think it's much deeper than that and comes part-and-parcel with being OCD.

My earliest memory of being a little too obsessed with organization comes from the summer of 1978. I was playing cars with the neighborhood kids, one of those rare instances when I agreed to play something other than super-heroes, Star Trek, or Star Wars. It was my box of toy cars and my porch, so therefore it was my rules. I couldn't quite decide on the division of the cars and the setting and circumstances in which we would play. One of the other kids asked me "Can we stop getting ready to play and just play?". That was a ridiculous notion and I told him as much. A few minutes later, I ended up playing alone.

At some point when we lived in Rochester, New Hampshire between 1979 and 1981, I got my hands on my Father's typewriter. My sister played with it for a few minutes and completely lost interest. But I remember sitting and working for awhile on a list of super hero names categorized under the teams in which they belonged. The experience was at once both pleasurable and frustrating, as I kept making mistakes and having to start over.

The ability to enforce order out of chaos is kind or rare, I think. Fifteen years ago, my Assistant Manager at Blockbuster marveled at the way I would storm in on a busy Friday afternoon, make a pile of all the chores he couldn't quite get done, and begin delegating tasks until the pile was gone. My distrust manager loved my "task clipboard", where I hand drew a grid and mapped out through the following week which member of the management team was to perform which task and on what shift. Other store managers thought it was way over the top. My assistants loved it, clearly knowing their expectations in advance. It was my first spreadsheet, before I actually had access to a computer.



This is my 'spreadsheet' of k-cups. Lorie was in charge of the k-cup drawer for about three minutes.

I've begun to create spreadsheets for no other reason than to get my overly-active brain to calm down for a few minutes. Compiling data on my various hobbies in a way I hadn't thought of before. It helps me when I'm really angry about something to just calm down and focus on something simplistic, monotonous, and structured.

Let's look at the spreadsheets on my iPad at this particular moment in time. I have 59 spreadsheets.

9 spreadsheets are in the "old" folder and no longer viable.
18 spreadsheets are dealing with comics in some way.
4 spreadsheets I use with the kids and parenting.
4 spreadsheets are for Ashton alone.
4 spreadsheets for music (remind me to tell you about my crazy iPod playlist habits sometime).
3 spreadsheets tracking my obsession with toys.
2 spreadsheets that help me with the budget.
2 spreadsheets for Christmas.
2 spreadsheets with notes on my computer set-up.
2 spreadsheets helping me track my exercising.
2 spreadsheets keeping track of my movies.
1 phone list for work.
1 gift notes spreadsheet.
1 list of items loaned out.
1 spreadsheet designed to help me with time management.
1 Years in Review quick reference guide (remind me to tell you about THAT sometime).
1 spreadsheet I made Lorie put together to track work on our house addition.
1 spreadsheet tracking blog posts. This particular post is slated for 7/20/2012, according to the spreadsheet.

It's worth noting that many of these spreadsheets have multiple tabs. For instance, one of my movie spreadsheets has a tab listing out the Hammer Horror films, the year in which they were released, whether they're in my collection, and whether I've seen them. Love me my Hammer Horror.

Say what you will, but all this spreadsheet madness just serves to make me better at my job.

You might wonder how all this is related to the blog theme of historical perspective. It's not, directly. But indirectly, I keep thinking it's all related. All my passions and hobbies have interrelated in some way. And you'll notice it's not just history I'm interested in, but specifically how history is related to pop culture.

And then there's this:


I started this spreadsheet a couple of days ago after I wrote about my Flash re-read. It struck me that I "needed" to track the major milestones in comic book publishing. And through that, divide out those milestones by character, chart the dates, and see if any interesting patters show up.


And look at that! We just discovered that Kid Flash and Aqualad were created within a month of each other. Both would go on to be founding members of the Teen Titans in 1964!


And you thought I was going overboard! Pshaw!

Thanks,
DCD