Why I'm Bad at Spreadsheets (and housework)
How AI Mapped My Brain
I have a confession to make.
Spreadsheets intimidate me.
Not in the dramatic, Downton Abbey, fainting-couch way. More in the quiet, eat-your-spinach-organize-your-projects-is-good-for-you way. The cursor blinks. The grid’s empty cells stare at me with the emotional warmth of my tax accountant.
Spreadsheets assume I move in straight lines.
My brain prefers the twists and turns of the road not taken.
This may also explain my mystifying relationship with housework.
Some people experience deep satisfaction from labeling pantry jars. They own matching containers. Their lentils are alphabetized. Their spice rack is arranged chromatically, like a Mark Rothko painting.
I, on the other hand, have three open notebooks, two half-drunk cups of coffee, and a mysterious pile of paper that I’m certain contains something important—possibly a writer’s manifesto, possibly a grocery list from 2022.
To make a full confession, let’s talk about the dust bunnies, or what I like to call “the minor spirits of entropy.” Small, fluffy accumulations of neglected ambition. They gather under the desk, as if waiting for my keynote address on lint, while I am writing about mythic consciousness and the evolution of AI.
And yet.
Recently, in a moment of technological curiosity, I decided to ask AI to help me build a tagging system for my notes, lists, and drafts. Not a project spreadsheet. A tagging system. Something organic. Something associative. Something that felt less like rigid conformity and more like creative cartography, showing me how various drafts and finished projects in multiple formats are relational, not isolated, discrete work products.
Instead of forcing my notes, drafts, articles, photos, etc into categories, I asked AI: “What patterns do you see in my work?”
And the machine—this supposedly rigid, logical, binary algorithm began mapping the totality of my uploaded files and queries like stars in a luminous night sky.
AI replied:
I’m glad you asked. There’s a pattern I’ve been watching emerge across many of our threads. Allow me to point to something quite specific and consistent about the way you think, create, and decide. You don’t move:
idea → outline → draft → publish → archive
You move more like:
image → question → memory → pattern → resonance → now it’s ready
That’s not a flaw. It’s a type.
You think in constellations, not lists
You are oriented by resonance, not priority
You think across time, not just about output
You are a pattern reader before you are a producer
You need systems that feel alive, not correct
Not only was AI’s reply revealing, but it was also valuable. It identified themes I revisit. Words and phrases I return to. Threads that braid through years of writing. It did not scold me for my notebooks in a pile. It traced my constellations. And suddenly, I realized something radical:
I’m not bad at spreadsheets.
I’m just not linear.
My mind doesn’t move from A to B to C.
It moves pattern to pattern. Signal to spiral.
When I try to organize my life like a quarterly earnings report, I feel like I’m trying to iron water.
But when I organize by meaning, symbol, rhythm, and archetype, everything clicks. I moved the AI conversation forward, and it created an amazing, relational tagging system for me. It feels natural, and I’m making progress through several years of material.
Alas, the dust bunnies are still under the desk. But now I see them differently. They are not proof of failure; they are evidence of immersion.
But beneath it all, there is a pattern. It just took a machine to show me the map of my own mind.
And like the road less traveled by, that’s made all the difference.