Rant: My anime watch order spreadsheet got corrupted and I lost months of work

So I keep this massive Google Sheet to track my watch order for big series with multiple seasons, OVAs, and movies. I'm talking stuff like Fate or Gintama where the order really matters. Last week, I opened it and half the cells were just garbled text. I spent over 40 hours across three days trying to fix it, checking version history and even trying to recover a local copy from my laptop. Turns out, I'd accidentally pasted some weird formatting from another doc and it broke everything. I had to manually rebuild the timeline for like 15 different shows from memory and my MAL list. Has anyone else had a tracker completely die on them? What do you use now that's more reliable?

4 comments

4 Comments

lilyt231mo ago

abby_murphy's right, losing my own messy notes might finally force me into a better system. Maybe the real watch order was the friends we made along the way.

abby_murphy1mo ago

Oh man, that physically hurts to read. My own watch list is a chaotic mess of browser tabs and sticky notes, so honestly, losing it all might be an upgrade. I feel like the real tragedy is remembering all those obscure OVA titles in the first place.

lee.cora1mo ago

It's like how we all have a junk drawer full of chargers we'll never sort. The mess becomes part of the system.

anthony_jackson3111d ago

Oh sure, let's just embrace the chaos until you're digging through that drawer for a micro-USB cable you haven't seen since 2015. But here's the thing - what happens when you actually need that specific obscure OVA title? Are you really gonna Google "anime where guy pilots mech and there's a beach episode in episode 3" and hope for the best? Because I tried that last week for a show I swore was called "Blue Comet" and ended up watching three episodes of something called "Blue Gender" before realizing my mistake. The real question is whether organized chaos is still chaos or if we're just lying to ourselves about having a system.