Nothing Says Thanksgiving Like a Spreadsheet

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year, stop everything. Before you decide which mashed potatoes to make, or which taper candles to buy for the center of the table, you need a plan. No—I’m not talking about a plan for how you’ll get it all done. I mean a plan for how you’re going to plan it all.

Never has there been a holiday with such a burgeoning cottage industry around sheer planning. You can buy be-turkeyed notebooks for your shopping lists and to-dos. You can drop double-digit dollars on Etsy to purchase a pile of digital worksheets to fill in with your prepping tasks and table assignments. You can stock up on extra-sticky Post-it notes for an analog scrum board, the way my colleague Hana Asbrink tracks her progress throughout a day of cooking. Or, if your job requires you to sit at a computer for most of the day anyway, you can simply reach for the closest collaborative computer software at hand.

For Kat Lieu, the author of Modern Asian Baking (and founder of the Subtle Asian Baking Facebook community), this all takes place on Trello, a web-based project management platform that allows you to keep a series of color-coded to-do lists and reminders for both small tasks and longer-term projects. She compares it to a sort of streamlined version of the sprawling wall of evidence that a character compiles in the show Manifest. “Imagine if he had this instead!”

Lieu has been using Trello since 2021 to keep track of freelance projects that she’s working on. And while she’s at it, it’s also how she’s planning the 14-person Thanksgiving dinner she’s hosting this year, complete with turkey, ham, and pancit Canton. Her Trello board keeps a running list of guest RSVPs, the menu, the groceries, all in the same digital workspace where she plans social media posts and recipe development projects. “I have this tab opened all the time,” she says. “So I remind myself what I need to do.”

Tracie Masek, a software engineer, does much of her planning throughout the year on a family Slack that brings her together with her husband, her sister, Megan, and her sister’s wife. “Most of our companies use Slack, so it’s easy to have it open at work and just be in a different workspace,” she tells me. The same qualities that make Slack a popular messaging app for a lot of tech and media companies (Epicurious included) make it an efficient way to share links, collaborate on Google docs, and hash out plans as a group.

This planning all culminates in what Masek calls “a massive, chaotic system of spreadsheets.” Both sisters take the full week off from work for a multi-day schedule of cooking. This year they’re hoping to smoke the turkey, using some of the smoked parts for collard greens, along with a whole slate of sides that they’ve never made before.

“I think it would take joy away from it if I had to plan Thanksgiving without a spreadsheet.”

“I think my family takes a lot of joy in turning things into work projects to be honest,” Masek explains. “We’re all very type A and very organized. We love a list, and we love a central document.” The sisters still laugh about their mom’s tendency, when they were growing up, to create binders for each vacation. “So I think honestly it’s just in our blood, and I like project management. I think it would take joy away from it if I had to plan Thanksgiving without a spreadsheet.”

“And not to sound too much like an engineer,” adds Tracie, “but we usually have a retrospective after these meals where we talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, and process changes for next time.”

My colleague Urmila Ramakrishnan has a similar system of debriefing. She compares her own system of archiving past Thanksgivings to the way you might keep folders of tax documents from years past. “It can feel like work, but everything worth doing is a little bit of a labor of love, especially if you’re the only planner for a group minimum of 10 people,” she says.

Who's in charge of the rolls? A spreadsheet can help with that.

David Yee, another software engineer, uses a color-coded Google Sheet to plan out all of the day-of cooking on Thanksgiving. This matrix starts out drawn on paper, which Yee describes as “the sketch for the oil painting.” On the final masterpiece, the x axis represents time, and the y axis is broken into different parts of the kitchen, with different colors representing the actions that need to happen to the food and the appliances.

Much like a family recipe that’s been passed down through the generations, the spreadsheet itself can be part of the holiday tradition. Six years ago, Alan Peplinski posted his mother’s spreadsheet template for planning Thanksgiving on Reddit and instantly went viral. Peplinski tells me that his mother, who used this spreadsheet system as far back as he can remember, passed away earlier this year, but his sister and her wife will probably use it to plan this year’s dinner.

When it first made splashes on the internet, Peplinski’s mom’s elegantly visualized system received thousands of comments and the types of accolades that you might normally associate with an expertly baked apple pie, not a spreadsheet. But who says that the Thanksgiving spreadsheet can’t be as beautiful as an heirloom pie recipe?

“It actually gives me joy to undermine the banal tyranny of spreadsheets generally,” says Yee. “I looked at a spreadsheet today, and it just made me sad. When I look at it and think about turkey—or I can in my head see what it’s like to scrape onions from the chopping board and put them in the stuffing, or to take out the dry bread and replace it with the brussels sprouts—all of that feels joyous to me. So for me, it actually changes my perception of spreadsheets to be more joyous.”