To any writer friends who are analytically minded, like me, I want to share with you a tip I have for keeping yourself writing regularly!
Now, when I say that I’m analytically minded, what I mean here is that I love data and statistics. This is why I was a math major people. I thrive on this stuff. Big data? Love it. Statistical modeling? Fucking awesome. But of course, being analytically minded can look different for different people. Anyway, I tried doing NaNo this past year for the first time, and while it didn’t go well at all (hahaha, focusing on one project at a time? Never!) it did give me an idea for something that could help keep me motivated. And that’s a writing tracker. And I mean a detailed writing tracker.
Here I have all of my WIPs, and the daily word count, and the total word count. I log it every day, for every WIP, even if the amount is zero. And It totals up both my daily counts and total word count for me each day. I have a lot of things set up to autocalculate and autopopulate, because I like that, but you definitely can do things manually.
Then, because I’m a very visual person, I wanted to see graphs of what’s going on here, because that helps me understand it better. So first up, I made a graph of how my daily totals are progressing, for each project and my overall daily total word count. Here’s what it looks like.
Each individual project may not look like it’s progressing that far, but look at the overall. It’s wild. Look how much progress that is. That’s over 30,000 words in the past two months. That’s awesome!
But that doesn’t tell me as much about how I’m working on each individual project, or other things about my daily work. Am I meeting my goal of 500 words a day? Am I mostly writing big chunks on one project or am I doing 100 words on 5 different projects? Am I focusing on one more than another? So now I did a chart of my daily word counts to get another picture of what’s going on. Here’s what that looks like.
And wow! Look at that. The beginning of the month started out all over the place - some days I hit the target by a long shot, some days a didn’t get close. Very erratic. But the past few weeks have been pretty consistent. I’m hitting the target almost every day, averaging probably about 700 words a day, which is good. You can see I’ve mostly been feeling two projects lately, which is okay, because one of them I’m trying to start posting by the end of the month, and the other I’d like to start posting soon as well, maybe by the end of February. But I should probably be mindful that I haven’t picked up any other projects in a few weeks. Don’t want to let them sit for too long.
Anyway, I want to share this, because this has been by far THE MOST productive and efficient writing period I’ve ever had. And that’s just because I’ve been tracking how much I write each day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but having that data and the visual representation of what’s going on in my writing is hugely satisfying for me, and it keeps me motivated writing more. Seriously, over 30,000 words written in less than two months! That’s crazy!
So basically, I highly suggest doing this if your a visual/analytical person like me, and I’m happy to set up one of these spreadsheets for you if you’d like, just shoot me a message!
