Do You Track Your Writing?

[nott theodore]

I've been thinking a lot about writing goals recently.  They might be something that people tend to make at the beginning of the year and then forget about (I'm definitely not talking about myself, not at all) while other people revisit them each day/week/month.  I'm just really intrigued to know how people record their progress with writing goals, if they do at all, and what you all find most helpful in motivating you with it  

A couple of questions that have been on my mind to kick this thing off:

• Do you keep track of your writing?  How regularly, and what measure do you use (word counts, finished chapters etc.)?
• Do you find you're more likely to achieve your goals if you keep track of your progress?
• Are there any resources that you use to track your writing?

[Darling_take_off_the_mask]

After I saw another HPFTer doing it, in January this year I started a google sheet to track my daily word count and keep a running tally of overall word count for the year. It's a fairly simple way for me to see my progress at a glance in terms of sheer volume. I was excited when I realized I had hit 100K sometime in June.

The only issue for me is when I don't update it daily, and I go a few days without updating. Do I go back through my docs (because google docs shows your version history so you can see how much you added each day) and figure out my daily word count each day over the past week, and fill in those boxes on my spreadsheet? Do I figure out my overall new word count for the past several days and just chuck the lump sum under today's date to make it easier on myself? Or, do I do what I have been doing for the past two weeks, which is realizing I haven't updated my word count for the past two weeks, and becoming less and less motivated to go fix it because it's starting to feel too labor intensive?  

That said, I don't necessarily think seeing my word count grow is what motivates me in my projects. One thing I try to do is, with WIP's, for example, give myself a time frame in which I should update with new chapters. Like for my one novel, I've told myself I need to go no more than a month between chapters. Currently, I am... [checks notes] ...a month overdue for an update, so...

[down-in-flames]

i track mine! i have a google sheet that i update fairly regularly (aka after pretty much every writing session) where i track my word count per month. i do it by chapter within the individual monthly sheets so that all i have to do is plug in the word count values that my doc spits out at me, and i pretty habitually have the file open whenever i'm writing so it's usually relatively up-to-date. (i say that, and then last week i randomly found an additional 1000 words of quidditchfic that i'd somehow never tracked anywhere, so it's not a completely foolproof system.) i also created a tab that tracks my word count across entire projects for the month/year, which is a cool thing to see but also very much shames me for the fact that i've written way more words that got filed under 'misc. one-shots' than under any of my wips this year. 

i'm a goal-oriented person to a fault, so tracking things and setting quantifiable goals definitely helps me write more. if i don't set hard goals for myself, both big long-term ones and narrower monthly ones, it literally just won't happen. i'm incapable of doing things casually or for fun, which is a great side effect of being me. and because of that, i need to be able to see my progress as i go so i know if i'm on track or behind where i should be, otherwise it all just feels like a mess lol. and i've found i like word count goals better than specific chapter goals, because it gives me at least some flexibility to work on whatever project i'm most inspired by instead of feeling like i have to work on something in particular. (idk how well this happens in practice but it's admirable on principle)

i use +this obnoxiously rainbow thing as a template. i made it a year or two ago - i keep my own word counts in a different file but someone had asked me for a template a while ago so i made it into a blank shareable one as well. 

[Hawksquill]

I track mine!  I set daily word count goals for myself and run sprints using the Writer Bot on Discord.  I also track monthly goals for myself on WriteTrack.  During NaNo and Camp NaNo events I do that on the NaNo website, too. 

[tinyporcelainehorses]

I've swung both ways on this in the past! I used to do broadly the same as Hawksquill, and I'd set very clear goals and keep a real eye on my progress.  And it's worked well, and given me some of the most productive writing times I've had! But during my last attempt at nano, I realized that that had the side effect of making me cripplingly anxious and self conscious about my writing, and afraid to try new things because what if it didn't work, what about my word count?  I've tried to move to just tracking my wordcount within a single session, and nothing more than that - I do subconsciously still work on a level of 'well, if I don't write a chapter every two weeks, that will mess with my buffer which will eventually mess with my posting schedule', though.  Your mileage may vary on how healthy that is!