"Our spreadsheets hammered home that what contributed most to our happiness was time spent together or with friends — while, crucially, not working — and there was no way to get more of that..."

"... if we continued to live in the Bay Area, one of the most expensive parts of the country. So I proposed an idea that would have seemed radical were there not so much data backing it: 'I think you should quit your job, we should sell our house, and we should move somewhere cheaper,' I told my husband matter-of-factly one day. So we did.... In addition to leading to a better understanding of what made us happy as a family, I also found the spreadsheet to be an incredibly useful tool for expressing things I might have otherwise avoided. It made the invisible visible. Instead of arguing about housework, for example, both feeling like we were doing more than our fair share, we could talk about it relatively objectively.... Far from making our marriage seem cold and robotic, the spreadsheet sparked more honest conversations than we’d had in years. It also reminded us that we had more control over our lives than we had been exerting...."

From "The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life/We tend to think that good marriages and happy families are born of love and care, not spreadsheets. But what if that’s wrong?" by Amy Westervelt (NYT).