Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Used a Simple Spreadsheet to Save 200 Hours a Year
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to talk about something embarrassingly low-tech today. Luna: Oh, I love when you say that. Tell me it involves a whiteboard or a paper notebook. Lucas: Even simpler. A Google Sheet. But not just any sheet — one that saved a solopreneur roughly two hundred hours a year. Luna: That's five full workweeks. What were they doing before? Copying everything manually? Lucas: Pretty much. So I came across a freelance designer named Jenna Ortiz. She shared her entire operations system on a blog post last month. Jenna runs a brand identity practice — logos, color systems, typography — and she was drowning in admin. Luna: Which is the classic solopreneur trap. You're good at the thing, so you think you can handle the business side yourself, but it eats your creative hours. Lucas: Exactly. She tracked everything manually. Emails in her inbox, project notes in a Word doc, time in a separate app, invoices in QuickBooks. None of them talked to each other. So every Monday she'd spend an hour reconstructing where each project stood. Luna: That sounds like a recipe for context-switching fatigue. Lucas: It was. And she realised she was losing about four hours a week just to status checks and data entry. That's two hundred hours a year, conservatively. Luna: So she built a Google Sheet. What's in it? Lucas: Three tabs. Tab one is a project tracker — client name, project type, start date, deadline, current phase, next action. Tab two is a communication log — date, person, channel, key points, follow-up needed. Tab three is a recurring task checklist — invoicing, portfolio updates, tax prep, things that happen weekly or monthly. Luna: That sounds like a simple CRM plus a todo list. But what made it save her two hundred hours? Lucas: The key was she added conditional formatting and a few array formulas. For example, if the 'next action' cell is blank, the row turns red. If a client hasn't been contacted in two weeks, the communication log highlights it. She also set up a dropdown for project phases — scoping, design, revisions, delivery, done. Once the phase hits 'done', the row greys out. Luna: So she eliminated the mental overhead of remembering where everything is. She just opens one sheet and sees red cells. Lucas: Right. She went from four hours of admin per week to about thirty minutes. Most of that is updating the sheet, which she does at the end of each day. And the sheet acts as her single source of truth. She stopped duplicating information across tools. Luna: Did she integrate it with anything else? Like calendar or invoicing? Lucas: Minimal integrations. She uses a simple Zapier connection that when a new row appears in the project tracker, it creates a calendar event for the deadline. And for invoicing, she exports a filtered view of completed projects to FreshBooks. But she keeps the core manual because she says the act of typing the update reinforces her focus. Luna: That's actually smart. Automation can be overkill if the manual step adds clarity. Lucas: It's a good reminder that the tool isn't the point. The discipline of the daily check-in is. Jenna said she tried Notion, Airtable, even a physical planner. But a spreadsheet was the lowest friction for her because she already used Google Sheets for budget tracking. She didn't have to learn new software. Luna: How long did it take her to set up? Lucas: She built the first version in about two hours. Then she iterated over a month — added the conditional formatting, adjusted the dropdowns. She shared a template on her blog, and I actually downloaded it. I'll link it in the show notes. Luna: I want to replicate this for my own workflow. I use a mix of Trello and Todoist, but I've been feeling the friction of looking in two places. Lucas: That's the common problem. Most solopreneurs I talk to use three to five different apps to manage their business. And each app has its own notification system, its own login. The cognitive load is real. Luna: So the solution isn't necessarily to find a better app. It's to consolidate into one simple system. Lucas: Exactly. Jenna's approach works because it's boring. There's no AI, no fancy dashboard. Just a spreadsheet with some color coding. But it saves her five weeks a year. That's time she can spend with clients, or just not working. Luna: I think the lesson here is to audit your own time first. Before you reach for a new tool, track how long you spend on admin for a week. Lucas: That's exactly what Jenna did. She did a time audit for one week and saw four and a half hours of pure admin. That's when she decided to build the sheet. If you don't measure, you won't know what's leaking. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small gesture that keeps the show independent. No sponsors, no ads. Just the stuff we find interesting. Luna: And if you've gotten value from past episodes, that's the place to say thanks. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Alright, back to the spreadsheet. One other thing Jenna did that I think is brilliant: she added a 'weekly review' row at the bottom of each project tab. Every Friday she spends ten minutes scanning the sheet and writing one sentence summarizing the week's progress per project. Luna: That's a lightweight way to build a project history without a separate journal. Lucas: Exactly. And she told me those sentences have been invaluable for her end-of-year reflection and tax prep. She can see how many projects she completed, what type, and how long they took. Without data extraction. Luna: It's amazing how much you can do with a single spreadsheet when you commit to the habit. Lucas: The habit is the hard part. But once it's in place, the tool becomes invisible. And that's the goal. Luna: I'm going to build my own version this week. I'll let you know how it goes. Lucas: I'd love to hear. And if anyone listening wants to share their own simple system, we'd love to feature it. Reach out to us at fexingo dot com. Luna: Until next time, keep it simple.