I Started Tracking Every Canceled Plan — The Data Destroyed My Excuses for Certain People

I am, by nature, a spreadsheet person. I budget in spreadsheets. I track my workouts in spreadsheets. I once made a spreadsheet to decide which apartment to rent. So when I started noticing that certain friendships were leaving me feeling vaguely stood up on a rotating basis, my instinct wasn't to journal about it or talk it out — it was to open Google Sheets and start logging.

What I told myself at the time: I just want to understand the pattern so I can figure out if I'm scheduling things wrong. Bad timing. Too many weeknight invites. Maybe people are just busy.

What I actually wanted: permission to stop making excuses.

How the Spreadsheet Started

It began pretty simply. Date, person, what the plan was, how far in advance they canceled, and whether they offered to reschedule. That last column turned out to be the most revealing one of all — but I didn't know that yet.

I wasn't tracking everyone. Just the people where something felt off. The ones where I'd hang up the phone after yet another "ugh, I'm so sorry, something came up" and sit there for a second too long staring at my wall. You know the feeling. The one you immediately talk yourself out of because you don't want to be the kind of person who keeps score.

Here's the thing though: not keeping score doesn't mean the score isn't happening. It just means you're the only one not looking at it.

What the Numbers Actually Said

After about four months, I had enough data to make myself genuinely uncomfortable.

One person — someone I'd considered a close friend for nearly six years — had canceled or rescheduled on me eleven times. Eleven. In four months. The reasons were always different. Work thing. Kid stuff. Tired. Forgot they had something. Car trouble once, which, fine. But eleven times. And in the "offered to reschedule" column next to their name? Twice. Both times initiated by me asking directly.

Another person had a perfect record — in the wrong direction. Every single time they canceled, it was same-day. Never more than two hours before we were supposed to meet. Always with a level of drama in the text that felt designed to make me feel guilty for being slightly inconvenienced by it.

And then there was the third category, which honestly stung the most: the people who never canceled because they never actually committed in the first place. The "we should definitely hang soon" crowd. The ones who respond to every invitation with some version of "let me check and get back to you" and then simply... don't. I added a second tab for those people. I called it "Ghost Maybes."

The Excuse Factory in My Own Head

Here's what I noticed myself doing as I filled in the rows: rationalizing in real time.

I'd type in a cancellation and immediately start writing a mental defense for the person. She's going through a lot right now. He's always been bad at follow-through but he means well. They have anxiety about making plans, it's not personal.

And look — some of that is genuinely true. People go through things. Mental health is real. Life gets messy in ways that aren't anyone's fault.

But I was applying that same generous interpretation to every single entry, for every single person, every single time. Which meant I was working twice as hard emotionally — once to manage my own disappointment and once to actively protect the other person from accountability they didn't even know I was considering.

The spreadsheet didn't let me do that as easily. Numbers don't respond to your empathy. Eleven is eleven.

The Column That Changed Everything

I keep coming back to that "offered to reschedule" column. Because what I found was that the people who canceled least often were also the most likely to immediately try to make it right. And the people who canceled constantly were almost never the ones reaching back out.

That's the part that shifted something in me. It wasn't really about the canceling. Stuff happens. Plans fall apart. I've bailed on people too — I know I have, and I'm not pretending otherwise. The difference is what you do after. Whether the other person's time registers as something worth protecting.

For some of the names on my list, it clearly didn't. And I had four months of color-coded evidence sitting right there in front of me.

What I Did With the Information

I didn't blow anything up dramatically. No confrontations, no breakup texts, no public callouts. That's not really my style and honestly it wouldn't have felt right — most of these people weren't being malicious. They were just... not prioritizing me. And they'd probably been doing it for longer than four months. I'd just finally started paying attention.

What I did do was quietly stop initiating. Not as punishment, not as a test — just as a practical decision. If someone had canceled on me eight times without once being the first to suggest a new plan, I wanted to see what happened when I stopped being the one to keep the thread alive.

For most of them? Nothing happened. The friendship just sort of dissolved into the occasional Instagram like and a birthday message every year. Which told me everything I needed to know about what I'd actually been carrying.

For one person — the six-year friend — I did eventually have a real conversation. Not about the spreadsheet (I'm not a complete weirdo), but about feeling like I was always the one showing up. It was awkward. She got defensive at first. But something shifted after that, and honestly? She's been more present since. Some people just need the mirror held up.

The Uncomfortable Takeaway

Here's what I didn't expect from this whole experiment: the spreadsheet wasn't really about them. It was about me finally taking my own time seriously enough to document when it was being wasted.

I spent years being the person who absorbed cancellations gracefully, who never made anyone feel bad, who kept showing up with the same enthusiasm even when the track record didn't warrant it. I thought that was being a good friend. I think now it was actually just being afraid — afraid that if I expected more, people would decide I wasn't worth the effort.

The data didn't fix that fear. But it did make it a lot harder to pretend the pattern wasn't there.

And sometimes that's the whole point. Not to have answers, but to finally stop lying to yourself about the questions.