“I will have to send you the tracker.”

“We have developed a tool that helps us track things.”

“You have the wrong version of the tracker.  I am sending a new one out now.”

“Did you get the tracker I sent last night?“

Ugh. Head butt me with a barbed wire bust of myself. I really do have a visceral reaction to the word “tracker”. It pains me greatly. I immediately have nightmarish visions of being buried alive under reams of awkwardly-printed spreadsheets. I peer up out of my Office-borne grave while a lifesize Excel icon cackles madly and continues to shovel.  No thanks (unnamed) friends (quoted above). Keep your trackers. I’m opting for sanity.

Seemingly, the act of “tracking” things is important. But the tool of choice for execution is almost always an utter failure. I mean no disrespect to the people I have come to know that use these tools. For the most part you work off inertia, inheriting endless scrolling and eye-scratching color schemes from some former POC. You toil madly to maintain the false reality of “up to date”, applying cryptic file naming conventions that no one understands but you, all the while crushing your co-workers’ email with multiple meg attachments replete with animated gifs and 18pt Comic Sans. Super. Please send more.

I thunk on this for a while and tried to figure out what about this practice bothers me so much. Here’s what I came up with:

1. The information is never current. Never. The sheer mechanics of emailing requests, receiving and consolidating information, and then sending out again is too slow to keep up with the velocity of life. Every time I get a tracker briefed to me, there are always caveats that x,y, and z, have changed since the time of publication. Alrighty then. So what’s the point? Thanks for letting me know what life was like last week.
2. The information is presented in the way the “collector” believes to be logical, understandable, and efficient. Unfortunately, this thesis is rarely true for anyone else. There are discrete professions dedicated to making information consumable and meaningful. 99 times out of 100, you are not one of these professionals. Therefore your use of color, presentation, and the basic tenets of usability are about as informed as my understanding of dairy farming or snake handling. (I love me some Dirty Jobs, but you definitely don’t want me to milk anything.)
3. Spreadsheets are great for accounting. But drop dead awful for faking workflow or including narrative. Creating columns to be filled in with dates that signify actions is not only the technological equivalent of building a house with an shoe-last celt, but completely ridiculous for conveying current status. And don’t get me started on narrative. Spreadsheets can handle a word or two here and there, but if I have to read another center-aligned, 6pt font excerpt in cell AZ154 I am going to blow a major artery.

So what is the alternative you ask? Simple:

Anytime you think you might need to track something with inputs from multiple people, say one word out loud: WEB-BASED. Start there and you will probably be miles ahead of where you are today.  I am a big fan of Confluence and JIRA for things like this but there are literally thousands of applications out there that will remove you from the hellish existence of spreadsheet trackers.