Television Torrent

How much TV do you watch? Is it hard to keep track of when shows air, which ones you’ve watched, and what you still need to catch up on?

I watch a LOT of television (though I have friends who watch at least double what I do) and being the organization-obsessed person that I clearly am, I have worked to come up with an easy to use method of tracking all of the shows I am watching, when they air, and when I have episodes to catch up on.

It all starts with a spreadsheet, of course. Make a list of all of the shows you watch, one show per row. Depending on how many shows you watch, you can use the tracking spreadsheet for just current and upcoming shows, but it may be easier for you to track everything, including off-air shows.

The columns of the spreadsheet are: Show Title, Day (of the week), Time, Channel, Premiere or Finale Date, and then a column for each week (usually three or four weeks at a time). Organize on air shows by day of week and time they are on and include a separate section at the bottom of the spreadsheet for streaming shows that drop whole seasons at once (for these you can ignore the Day and Time columns).

Use an “x” or other marker in the appropriate cell to indicate that a show has a new episode in a given week. You can even highlight it once it has aired so you can easily see what is available to be watched (I watch very little live as it airs). I even use different colors to indicate that it’s a show I can watch at work or if it’s an entire streaming season that’s available.

Do you just set the DVR for everything you watch and hope for the best or do you have some sort of system in place to track what you watch?