Most first-time parents, to track their newborn’s poops, pees, and feeds, use a mobile app of some sort to track, at least for the first few months, at the request of their child’s pediatrician. A lot of parents stop tracking after the first 3-6 months. In our case, Chris didn’t want to use an app like Huckleberry because he wanted to own the data, so he went ahead and constructed a massive Google Sheet complete with a raw data tab that links to multiple charts and pivots. I added some rudimentary tabs tracking breast milk output, solids introduced, and associated pivot tables. And this is how Chris has been, in real life and real time, making “data driven decisions” for our daughter. We still update it daily; Chris wants to update it until her 1st birthday. I will likely keep tracking my breast milk output until I fully wean, and I want to keep track of her solids introduction for as long as I can.

I reference the sheet occasionally to my colleagues, and two of them this week asked to see the doc. So I shared my screen to show them, and both of them had their jaws literally drop. One of them had a look of fear on her face.

“Ohmigod, this is unreal,” one of my colleagues said. “Chris did all of this? And you guys update it… EVERY SINGLE DAY?”

I insisted that it was really just a raw data tab that needs updated, that everything else gets automatically updated. But they all looked in awe of the tabs, charts, and pivot tables, saying that this document was really “#goals” as a parent.

“I hope I can build something similar when I have a child!” a colleague marveled in total admiration.