Creating a spreadsheet to track your progress is a good idea. However, it is only feasible if you have a few shows in your list right now. MDL already gives us the option to track the dates we started and ended watching shows but they do not give us the opportunity to make use of such data. Moreover, I believe that if one is religiously tracking all the data on a spreadsheet, then there is no point to use MDL since the spreadsheet gives one more freedom to personalise the data one feels more important.
I know that a good many of us here on MDL are using this site for its ability to let us track the shows we watched/are watching. But if one were to compare it to MAL, a similar site but for tracking anime and manga, there are several areas where MDL is lacking.
First, watch lists in MDL lacks personalisation. I personally do not feel it necessary to know which country a certain show is from and do not need others to know that when they look at my watch list either. MAL gives the option to choose what columns to include in one's watchlist for one to appreciate or share publicly with the community (Fig 1).
Moreover, if MDL is not keen to create a timeline feature in the near future, I think it would be very easy for them to allow us to add a column to our watch lists that will display when we started/ended watching a show (Fig 2). This will be far much better than the current option of sorting by year since there are long-running variety/music shows that are only characterised by the year they started airing.
Even so, I still hope that MDL would take this suggestion seriously because I am sure that everyone here wants to show others how they have changed over the years. After all, one's taste in shows is always evolving.
Fig 1. Column options in MAL to add to watchlist
Fig 2. Example of a column with start/end dates on an MAL watchlist
