Don't use an app for that!

Friends of mine know that I’m somewhat obsessive regarding tracking the media I consume. Over the past nearly ten years, I’ve written down almost every movie I’ve seen, every episode of every TV show I watched, and every book I’ve read, for some periods, even which pages on which dates. I keep track of all of this data in spreadsheets.

I believe the reason I’ve been able to stick to the habit for this long is because it’s easy. If I spend two hours watching a movie, spending 30 seconds to jot down some info in a spreadsheet row feels fine.

Now, I could’ve used a service like Goodreads, librarything, Letterboxd, trakt.tv, serializd. There’s no shortage of apps that aim to do this for you. However, companies get sold or go bankrupt, and open-source projects get abandoned. Sure, most of the time, this is not a big deal; you can export and migrate your data. Sure, it might be in a weird format, and you might need to wrangle it a little to make it fit, but that’s easy, right? Sure, it might be on short notice, and you’ll need to shift your priorities a little, but it’s no biggie, right?

Do you really want to spend time migrating your data? I’m confident I’ll still be able to open my CSV file in 10 years.

When establishing a process, I try to think about the total cost of ownership. You wouldn’t buy the cheapest car when you already know it requires constant repairs. “If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. […] Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.”¹