Spreadsheets are your friend

Spreadsheets are your friend. Every PM tool you have ever paid for was, underneath, a spreadsheet with opinions. You can run a real project on Google Sheets.

A working PM spreadsheet has six columns: Task, Owner (one human), Due date, Status (Not Started / In Progress / Blocked / Done), Notes, and a Link to wherever the actual work lives. That is the whole tool. You can sort by owner, filter by status, color-code blocked rows, and share it with the whole team for free.

Three tabs is plenty for most projects. Tab 1: Tasks (the live working list). Tab 2: Decisions Log (date, decision, who decided, why). Tab 3: KPIs (the weekly numbers from Module 3). Some projects add a fourth tab for the budget. That covers it.

Why spreadsheets work for community projects: free, no learning curve, everyone has Google access, no per-seat fees, easy to export, easy to back up. The downsides — no native automations, no nice mobile UI, no built-in reminders — can be patched with calendar invites and one Monday morning ritual.

When to graduate beyond a spreadsheet: when the team is over ten people, when you need automated dependencies between tasks, or when you have an external funder requiring a specific tool. Until then: stay simple. The tool is not the project.