When you don't need project management software
Not every project needs dedicated software. Here's how to recognise when spreadsheets work better and when they'll eventually fail you.
There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes from managing a project in a spreadsheet when you feel like you should be using ‘proper’ tools. Everyone else seems to be in Asana or Monday.com or whatever’s currently fashionable. You’re updating cells in Google Sheets like it’s 2008.
Here’s the thing: sometimes that’s exactly right.
The project management software industry has spent billions convincing us that every task list needs a dedicated platform. But most projects don’t. Some will collapse without proper tooling - but fewer than the vendors want you to believe. The skill is knowing which is which before you’re three weeks in and regretting your choice.
The spreadsheet sweet spot
Spreadsheets work surprisingly well for projects with these characteristics:
One person holds the whole picture. If a single person can track everything in their head and the spreadsheet just externalises that knowledge, you’re fine. The moment you need multiple people to independently understand project status without asking you, spreadsheets crack.
Dependencies are minimal or obvious. A marketing campaign with sequential phases (research → creative → launch) lives happily in a spreadsheet. A software build where Task 47 blocks Tasks 52, 58, and 61, which themselves block Tasks 70-75 - you need something that visualises relationships, or you’ll discover blocked work the hard way.
The timeline is short and fixed. Three weeks to deliver a report? Spreadsheet. Six months of overlapping workstreams with shifting deadlines? You’ll spend more time maintaining your spreadsheet than doing actual work. I’ve watched a 12-person team burn 4+ hours weekly in “spreadsheet reconciliation meetings” that proper tooling would have eliminated.
Status updates are conversations, not data. If ‘how’s it going?’ followed by a quick chat is your reporting mechanism, a spreadsheet with red/amber/green works. If stakeholders need to check progress without interrupting you, you need something self-service.
The common thread: spreadsheet project management works when the overhead of maintaining it stays lower than the overhead of learning dedicated software. That calculation shifts based on project complexity, team size, and how many similar projects you’ll run.
Where spreadsheets quietly fail
Spreadsheets don’t break dramatically. They degrade slowly, and you don’t notice until you’re already in trouble.
The first sign is versioning chaos. You email the sheet. Someone makes changes. You make changes. Now there are two truths. Google Sheets helps, but introduces its own problems - who changed cell B47? When? Why does it now contradict the email from Tuesday?
Then there’s the notification problem. Spreadsheets don’t tell anyone anything. When a deadline moves or a task gets reassigned, someone has to communicate that separately. In dedicated tools, the system handles this. In spreadsheets, you are the system. Miss one Slack message about the update, and three people work from outdated information for two days.
Historical data vanishes. Six months from now, can you reconstruct how long that project phase actually took? What got delayed and why? Spreadsheets capture state, not change. You lose the story of how you reached completion - which matters more than most people realise when estimating future work. That phase you remember as “about three weeks” was actually seven.
Most insidiously: spreadsheets make everything look equally important. A flat grid doesn’t distinguish between ‘blocks the entire project’ and ‘nice to have eventually.’ You can add priority columns, but nothing enforces that anyone looks at them. Everything sits at the same visual weight, demanding the same attention.
The honest tool selection question
Stop asking ‘do I need project management software?’ Ask: ‘what’s the cost of getting this wrong?’
For a solo freelancer tracking three client projects - the cost of spreadsheet failure is low. You’ll notice problems quickly. Fixing them means updating your own system. Start with a spreadsheet. If it hurts, upgrade.
For a team of eight shipping a product with external dependencies and a hard deadline - the cost of poor tooling is brutal. Miscommunication compounds daily. Status meetings become archaeology expeditions. I’ve seen teams spend 6+ hours weekly in meetings that existed solely because nobody could answer “where are we?” without assembling everyone in a room.
The inflection point sits around 4-5 people actively working on interconnected tasks. Below that, coordination happens through direct communication and simple tracking. Above it, you’re fighting your tools instead of using them.
There’s a parallel in theatrical productions. Small fringe shows run on paper plots and verbal cues - the stage manager holds everything and talks directly to a handful of crew. Broadway shows use sophisticated cueing systems and digital prompt books because with 50+ crew members, the stage manager physically cannot be the coordination layer. The complexity isn’t pretension. It’s physics.
Your project probably isn’t Broadway. But it might not be a fringe show either. Be honest about which one you’re running.
Making the call
If you’re uncertain, start simpler. Use a spreadsheet. Set a concrete trigger for reconsidering: ‘if I spend more than 30 minutes this week just maintaining the tracker, I’ll evaluate real tooling.’
What that tooling should be is a separate question. Most teams under 10 people are better served by lighter-weight options than the enterprise platforms everyone’s heard of. You want the capabilities you’re missing - dependency tracking, notifications, historical data - without drowning in features designed for 500-person organisations.
But sometimes the answer is: keep the spreadsheet. Not everything needs optimising. Not every task list is a project. If what you have works, the fact that it’s unfashionable is irrelevant.
The people selling you project management software have obvious incentives. Your spreadsheet doesn’t upsell.
Quick reference
Dependencies: Tasks or deliverables that rely on the completion of other tasks before they can begin or be completed.
Workstreams: Parallel streams of work or sequences of related activities that run alongside each other within a project.
Red/amber/green status: A simple traffic light reporting system where red indicates problems, amber indicates caution or at-risk, and green indicates on-track.
Versioning chaos: The problem that occurs when multiple versions of the same document exist simultaneously with different changes, creating confusion about which is current.
Historical data: Records of past information and changes that can be analyzed to understand how long tasks actually took or what issues occurred.
Self-service reporting: Allowing stakeholders to check project status independently without needing to ask the project manager for updates.
Inflection point: The threshold or moment where a situation fundamentally changes, requiring a different approach or tool.