The Spreadsheet My Family Trusts
My youngest daughter called me last week to ask where we were staying in San Diego. Before I could answer she stopped herself. Oh wait, I know. It's in the spreadsheet. I'll go look it up.
I caught myself smiling after we hung up.
She didn't need me to find it. She knew where to look. And the place she knew to look was a Google sheet I started months ago called Vacations 2026.
We're getting her ready for graduation, which means we're getting the whole family ready for a trip that has more moving parts than any I've planned in a long time. Different flights for different people. A road trip down the coast with my aunt. The visit to San Diego for the ceremony. Then Hawaii, two islands. Rental cars, hotels, a couple of VRBOs. The works.
Every year I start one of these spreadsheets. The whole family knows by now. Every detail of every trip goes into this one place. Flight numbers, confirmation codes, hotel addresses, the name of the VRBO host, the time the rental car shuttle picks up. We keep it in Google Drive so it lives somewhere we can all get to it. Even without wifi we can pull it up. That part matters more than people think.
It's an extra step. I'll say that out loud. When I'm booking something, the system asks me to also open the sheet and put the details in. That's another five minutes per booking. Most of the time I'd rather just be done. I do it anyway, every time, because of what it gives back.
One place, every time
The thing that makes this work is that there's only one place. Not a spreadsheet, and also my email, and also a screenshot on my phone, and also a Note titled Hawaii Stuff. Just the spreadsheet.
I learned this the hard way. Early on, trip info was scattered. I'd get to a hotel and scroll through old booking emails trying to find the confirmation number. At the rental car counter, I'd realize the agreement was in a PDF I'd skimmed months earlier. Every leg of the trip had its own little scavenger hunt. The spreadsheet ended that the moment I committed to using it as the only source.
When the same information lives in five spots, none of them is the place. Each one becomes another thing to search. The whole point of a setup like this is that your brain knows exactly where to go without thinking, and that only works if there's exactly one destination.
The same is true in business. If your onboarding info lives in your email, and a Notion page, and your head, and a Google doc someone built once, your team has it in none of those places. They have four half-versions, and any one of them might be the most current, or might not. One place is the difference between having information and having four guesses.
The whole family stopped asking me
When my daughter said I'll go look it up, that's the part of this I love the most.
For years I was the human lookup tool. Every trip, every time. Mom, where's the hotel, what time does the flight land, can you forward me that confirmation again. I knew it all, mostly, but the constant reaching for me to surface the next detail was its own kind of work.
Now they go to the sheet. My husband does. The older kids do. The system carries it, and they trust it.
It's the same pattern in business. When a team has one trustworthy place where information lives, they stop pinging the same person for every detail. They figure out what they need on their own, build the muscle, get faster. That person, often you, gets to stop being the bottleneck. It's a gift to the team, and it's a gift to you.
I get my head back
When something is in the sheet, I stop carrying it in my head.
A lot of us do this thing where we keep tabs on a hundred small details just to make sure none of them fall: arrival times, pickup confirmations, whether the deposit got paid, the number of bags allowed on the inter-island flight. Each one is small. All of them together are a low hum that runs in the background all day.
The minute it's in the sheet, the hum stops on that particular thing. My brain trusts that the sheet has it, so my brain lets it go.
That space is the actual point. I want my attention back for the trip itself, my kids, my aunt on the drive down the coast, the slow parts of the vacation that are the whole reason we go. I want it for the daily things in my life that matter too. The details of where we're staying in San Diego can live on a tab in Google Drive. They don't need to live in my head.
It works the same way in business. Every detail you're carrying in your head is taking up attention you could be giving to a client, a creative decision, a conversation with someone on your team. When the recurring stuff lives somewhere reliable, your brain trusts it's handled, and the attention comes back to where you actually wanted it.
The five minutes is the cheapest five minutes I'll ever spend
The first time you build something like this, it feels like extra work. Because it is. You're paying up front in five minutes at booking, the decision about what columns the sheet should have, the discipline to use it instead of skipping it that one time when you're tired.
Then you start getting it back. My daughter looks something up on her own instead of asking me, two minutes I didn't spend. I check the sheet during the trip instead of digging through my inbox, three more. Years later, a friend asks where we stayed in Italy and I open the 2023 sheet and read it off in thirty seconds.
The math gets a little ridiculous over time. Five minutes up front buys you hours back, spread across people and years.
The same math runs in business. Every setup that feels like it's slowing you down at the start is buying you time you'll never have to spend later. The Loom you record once handles twenty conversations you didn't have to have. An onboarding doc takes care of hours of questions before anyone has to ask them. The minute up front is the only minute you'll spend on that particular thing for years.
It's like this in our business
I'm telling you about a vacation spreadsheet but you already know I'm not really talking about vacation. These small ways of documenting, these little systems we set up, the one place where the thing lives, that's what saves us in business too.
Think pricing sheets, intake forms, the Slack channel where every decision gets posted so you can search it later, the shared folder that holds everything for a project. None of them are exciting. All of them do the same job the vacation spreadsheet does: one trusted place to look, heads that clear, a small cost up front and payback that runs forever.
Where I see this with clients
When clients tell me they're overwhelmed, I almost always find the same thing. The information they need to run their week is scattered across email, Slack, their head, a sticky note in the drawer. They're doing the lookup work themselves every time, for every detail, because there's no one place to send themselves or anyone on their team.
We start by picking one. One place where this category of information will live. Everything gets poured in. The next time the question comes up, we go to that place instead of around it. Within a few weeks the pinging slows down, heads clear, a small portion of the day comes back.
It doesn't have to be a spreadsheet. A Notion page, a shared doc, an Airtable, a folder on a drive, any of them will work. The tool matters less than the rule, which is that there's one place, everyone knows where it is, and everyone uses it.
A few signs you need one. The same question gets asked more than twice and you keep being the one answering it. You're the only person who knows where a particular thing lives. Email or Slack keeps becoming your search tool for recurring info. Something keeps falling through, not because anyone is careless, but because there's nowhere for it to land.
Pick the most obvious one this week. Build the sheet, or the page, or the doc. Pour everything in. Tell the people who need it where it lives. Use it the next time, even when it's easier not to.
Tomorrow I'm booking one last hotel, for the night we're coming back from Hawaii. Five extra minutes to put it in the sheet. And then I'm done thinking about it.
What's the one thing in your business or your life that needs a spreadsheet you haven't made yet? Tell me in the comments. I'd love to hear.
Shell, Yes! Here's to your success!
FAQ
-
No. A Notion page, an Airtable, a shared doc, a folder on a drive will all do the same job. What matters is that there's exactly one of them, that everyone who needs the information knows that's where it lives, and that you actually use it every time instead of going around it.
-
Usually that means the one place isn't easy enough to get to yet, or it's missing something they need, or you're still serving as the human shortcut, so they're not motivated to switch. Make the system the easier path and make yourself the harder one. Stop answering the question directly. Point to the sheet.
-
As detailed as future-you or future-them will want it to be. The test I use: would this answer the question without me being in the room? If yes, it's enough. If you'd still need to be texted to fill in the blank, it isn't yet.