It took me having a baby to figure out that not everything needs an app — here’s the free tool I use instead

The Spreadsheet Revolution: How a Baby Made Me Ditch Apps for Good

In today’s digital age, there truly is an app for everything—from navigation and fitness tracking to incredibly niche tools like bird identification apps that can recognize species by their calls. Yes, Shazam for birds exists, and while it works remarkably well, it’s also a notorious battery drain if you’re not careful.

The app ecosystem is vast, with hundreds of thousands of options spanning multiple devices and platforms. Some are genuinely useful, while others are complete wastes of bandwidth—looking at you, premium wallpaper subscription apps that charge monthly fees for glorified JPEG collections.

However, it wasn’t until I became a parent that I truly questioned whether everything needs its own dedicated application. There are countless apps designed specifically for parents, especially those with newborns, and in my experience over the past few months, this has led me to a surprising revelation: not everything needs to be an app.

Having a baby is an overwhelming experience that extends far beyond the actual birth process. You suddenly find yourself responsible for a tiny, defenseless human who requires round-the-clock care. The sheer volume of tasks—tracking feeds, diaper changes, sleep cycles, medication schedules—can be staggering, especially when you’re operating on minimal sleep.

Naturally, the app market responded to this need with countless tracking applications promising to help parents manage all this data. But here’s the problem: these apps are often bloated, trying to do too much at once while charging monthly subscription fees. Even worse, my wife and I struggled to access the information across different devices. We couldn’t share data between our accounts, and logging in with the same credentials proved frustratingly unreliable—hardly ideal when both parents need real-time access to this crucial information.

The solution? We scrapped all the dedicated baby tracking apps and turned to something simple, reliable, and cloud-based: a spreadsheet.

Think about it—what are most tracking apps if not glorified spreadsheets with fancy interfaces? Once you get past the initial intimidation of working with a grid of cells, spreadsheets become incredibly intuitive. We created a simple Google Sheets document where we could log feeding times and amounts, diaper changes, sleep schedules, and medication administration. The beauty lies in its simplicity and versatility.

By saving a shortcut to our spreadsheet on our phone home screens, we always have immediate access. The cloud-based nature means it’s instantly shareable with anyone we choose, and we’re not locked into a specific ecosystem or forced to pay recurring fees. Babies are expensive enough without adding $10 monthly subscriptions for baby analytics on top of formula, childcare, and clothes they outgrow in weeks.

The one drawback is that dedicated apps can offer AI-powered insights that spreadsheets can’t easily replicate. However, for us, the cost savings and data privacy benefits far outweighed any analytical advantages. Plus, we’re not sharing our personal information with yet another faceless tech company—just Google, which already has more than enough data about us.

This experience forced me to reevaluate my entire app collection. I realized I’m just as guilty as anyone else of cluttering my phone with unnecessary software. Do I really need a separate internet speed test app when I can use a browser version? Apps for websites I rarely visit, games I haven’t played in years, duplicate calculator apps (I still don’t know how that happened), or the Disneyland Paris app when I haven’t been there in over a year?

It was time for a digital detox. I began trimming the fat, consolidating services, and freeing up valuable storage space. The spreadsheet solution for baby tracking was just the beginning of a broader realization about digital minimalism.

In an era where tech companies constantly push us toward specialized applications for every conceivable need, sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. A well-organized spreadsheet can often replace multiple dedicated apps, saving money, reducing complexity, and giving you more control over your data.

So before you download that shiny new app promising to solve all your problems, consider whether a simpler solution might work just as well—or better. Your phone’s storage, your wallet, and your peace of mind will thank you.

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