It was built on a Sunday, by someone who had finally had enough. Seven columns. Conditional formatting on the rate field. A tab called Archive, which was ambitious for a document four hours old. By the eleventh row it was already the best system the studio had ever had.
It received its final entry on a Tuesday. Nobody noticed for eleven months.
It did not die of neglect
Blaming discipline is the comfortable explanation and the wrong one. The spreadsheet died because it asked for six manual fields at the precise moment its author was doing something else, and that is a losing trade every single time.
The bookmark button never asks for anything
One keystroke, no decisions, no cursor placement. Any system competing with that has to be roughly as cheap, or it loses to the thing that is — and then loses again to nothing at all.
Its real cause of death was schema drift
By row nine the columns had stopped meaning one thing each. Rate held day rates and hourly rates. Notes held both availability and opinions. Once the schema blurs, filtering stops working, and once filtering stops working the document is a list you scroll, which is a folder with borders.
You cannot sort a vibe
Sort of, sometimes, depends on the project — all legitimate human answers, all fatal to a spreadsheet column.
What to keep from it
The instinct was correct. Structure beats a pile. The columns chosen on that Sunday — name, portfolio, skills, rate, status — were the right columns, which is worth noticing: the design was fine, the data entry model was the fatal part.
Keep the schema, delete the typing
Same fields, filled automatically from the page already open. That is the entire fix, and it is the only version that survives past week three.