I'm a creative, but I've always done tech. Also I'm on the mystic side of things, so it might sound like I'm someone totally shying away from spreadsheets.

The opposite is the case. Why?

Sailing solo at night in coastal waters is a great experience! Its all pitch black, you've got lighthouses to give you exact boundaries, and unless you're hanging on to a GPS as a weak fuck there is a lot of hands on navigation.

Do the basic math right, calibrate it as you go, get a feel of how accurate you are, and soon you can do things like approaching dark islands in a safe way. Out of the pitch dark something even darker appears, right around when you planned for it!

When I started up my own solo business again in 2005 I really needed to keep tabs. It was another "impossible" field, where I'd really have to work hard to make ends meet.

So I started doing spreadsheets, but on paper. Got it all wrong, for weeks I though I'd be totally OK, then that illusion vanished.

Soon I had a setup that matched the business, and at that point I rebooted what I learnt doing a course on Staroffice in 88, while I was in the army. Even did it the old way typing formulas in instead of using the GUI haha...

Around 5 years later I was about to pull a real stunt in the open source community, I converted the social capital that I'd accumulated into getting a trademark and some tiny sum in seed funding from a neighbouring country, their name was hot back then, so it was quite a reach for me.

We spent around half a year planning and modelling this in spreadsheets, three layers that were intertwined with references all over. Which probably is why it was all approved.

The runway was of course the key, as in any startup, how long would it take us to get a profitable cashflow?

Of course reality kicked in, which is another story, rebranding and doing a fusion that you never complete is a downright stupid move when you've already got a stellar name... But what could I do, haha!

The spreadsheet that became really useful once the model failed was the one for liquidity or cashflow. It became my daily tool, and at one point it made it possible for me to see the exact day where we were technically insolvent, which I used to slash wages, fire the only productive guy, do a sale and at the end of the day I'd conjured up ~10k out of this pure chaos haha...

This spreadsheet was vertical, with the closest day at the top. I later used it for one of my other companies, it was equally useful, but only when my partner listened, which was an infrequent thing, this is how the creative space is in most cases I guess!

There is of course a lot to write about this... I guess my take on it is that its totally weird how my mind can reach for and hodl those few sats like mad, while the swings of what I have onchain is a multiple of that most days.

Of course these past ~5 years have made it abundantly clear to me that I can't handle Bitcoin the same way as say cash in an account, not mentally, and certainly not as real transactions.

Now and then I do some mental calculations about my runway of course, especially since I've had no real sources of income since ~2018, its been complicated with visa, family, medical stuff and walking away from the company branch I had just set up here when 2020 hit.

But I do not keep tabs down to the individual sats, early on it became clear that this would just add a ton of stress, so along with my decision in late 2020 to not trade I also threw my previous habits out the window.

However... These days I'm wondering if I should not start modeling & keeping tabs again...

Its a weird thing to think that your personal runway can have a length that varies a lot by the day, but now that I've been through so much, why not?

Has my thinking about not only Bitcoin but reality itself gone through so much that now I'd be able to take it?

Might it now contribute to my decisions around Bitcoin and everything else in a good way, instead of just leading to stress as happened before?

One thing that would be very different now is that I'd keep a tentative runway in sats, but where if I have to spend a lot I'd also have to convert it. I'd probably set up a section for fiat to burn too, and the goal would of course be to never run out of that runway...

Also if I do this I'll do it in sats. I do not think large numbers will fool me too much, and what I earn is of course in sats.

Another thing I'd do if I get into this is to start translating every item I get daily into sats. Sometimes I do that of course, but not in a stricter way where I'd keep track of how much I spend weekly or so.

It would be a wild ride of course, but since it seems that fiat prices will only go down in Bitcoin terms then maybe a process like this will be a *far better mechanism * to determine what I'll do each day, week, month and year?

Looks like its time to find a good alternative to Googlag docs here ;-)