My Epic Fail with a Simple Weekly Tracker
So, you know how I’m always trying to get things organized, right? Always fiddling with some new system to make my life just a tiny bit smoother. Well, a while back, leading up to that first week of April, I got this brilliant idea for something super simple, I thought. I wanted to track my daily water intake, seriously, but not just track it, I wanted this cool, automated little reminder system for that specific week, thinking it’d be a neat habit kickstart.
I kicked off by thinking, “Okay, a simple spreadsheet, that’s the ticket.” My brain immediately went to trying to set up some conditional formatting and a few basic formulas in Google Sheets. I pictured it: green cells when I hit my target, red if I didn’t, and a little pop-up reminder on my phone, linked to the sheet. Sounds simple enough, right?
My first move was to open up a fresh sheet, slapped “Water Intake Tracker – April Week 1” right at the top. I wrote down the dates, like April 1st, April 2nd, all the way to April 7th. Then I added a column for “Glasses Drank” and another for “Target Met?”. The target was, say, 8 glasses. Pretty standard.
The trouble started when I tried to get those dates to behave. I wanted the sheet to automatically highlight the current day. Easy peasy, I thought, just use some conditional formatting with TODAY() function. Except, you know how it is sometimes, you type it in, and it just… doesn’t quite click. I kept messing up the cell references, or the range. It wasn’t highlighting what I thought it would. I swear, the little green border around my selected cells was mocking me.
Then came the “reminder” part. My bright idea was to link this sheet to some other app or even try to use Zapier, or something like that, to ping my phone if I hadn’t updated my intake by a certain time. This is where I truly went off the rails. I started digging into how to make Google Sheets talk to other services for notifications. I watched a couple of shaky YouTube tutorials, full of people mumbling into their microphones. I tried copying some “script” code I found online, pasting it into the script editor. Of course, it didn’t work. It just threw up errors like “ReferenceError: Sheet is not defined” or “TypeError: Cannot read property ‘getRange’ of null.” Total gibberish to me at the time.
I spent an entire evening, probably close to three hours, just wrestling with this simple thing. My wife walked by at one point, saw me muttering to myself, and asked, “Honey, are you still trying to get your water tracker to send you a text?” I just grunted something about “technical difficulties.” I swear, the more I tried to automate, the more manual work I was actually doing just to set up the automation. It was backwards!
I tried simplifying. I deleted the complicated scripts. I went back to just the conditional formatting for the dates. But even that seemed to fight me. I’d click on the “Format rules” and just stare blankly at the options. My brain felt like a tangled ball of yarn. I’d try one thing, hit apply, nothing. Try another, hit apply, still nothing. It was beyond frustrating for something that should have been a five-minute job.
Finally, around midnight, I just threw my hands up. I closed the laptop with a sigh. All that time, all that effort, for a silly water tracker for one week. And you know what I ended up doing for that first week of April? I grabbed a small notebook and a pen. I literally drew seven boxes, one for each day. And every time I drank a glass of water, I put a little checkmark in the box. And if I forgot, well, I just reminded myself the old-fashioned way. No fancy pop-ups needed.
It was a massive relief, honestly. The whole exercise taught me a huge lesson. Sometimes, in my quest to optimize and automate every single little thing, I completely lose sight of the actual goal. The goal wasn’t to build a super-complex, automated water-tracking system; the goal was to drink more water for a week! And the simplest, most straightforward path was right there, staring me in the face, while I was off chasing digital ghosts.
So yeah, that was my “brilliant” plan for the first week of April. Learned my lesson about overthinking the small stuff. Sometimes a pen and paper just get the job done without all the fuss and headaches. And guess what? I hit my water goal that week, no fancy tech required!
