Tracking Writing Productivity

1

Hi, I am tracking my writing productivity. I am using an excel spreadsheet to track pages per chapter and pages for a whole book. I am using an app called Klok as a timer (because I have had this in my workflow in the past). I am interested in whether an hours per day target or a daily page target generates higher actual page counts. Note that I cannot count words in my situation, but my pages are fixed in size.

I spent last week trying out the tracking and working out some of the kinks. I am trying a self-experiment for the next two weeks: this week target is 5 hours a day and in two weeks after some travel, I will use a page target of three pages per day.

One thing that is a little hard is whether some time that I put in counts as ‘writing’. If I pace across the room while thinking, or if I spend time editing a draft of a graphic from my designer, are those activities 'writing" time or not. This is less of an issue with daily page targets, although I guess I would count all that time as toward the goal if the graphic went into the document.

2

Track quality too. Keep track of which pages you wrote and when. This will allow you to later add quantified criticism and editing to your tracking.

3

I have been doing this informally in a comments column, along with reasons why I did not generate targets that day. It is difficult to assess my own quality as I progress. Sometimes I think something is great and then three weeks later I think it is ridiculous and terrible.

Open to suggestions for what constitutes quality as a trackable element.

Thanks for responding.

4

Hi Ted, Allen Neuringer rated “quality of ideas” by looking at them after some time had passed. He discovered that his ideas were better after moving around, rather than sitting.