Monitoring Your Writing

So I spent the last year monitoring my writing, carefully recording each day, the number of words I had written and what I had written it on. Now, I did this for a number of reasons. The first one was mainly to track my word count for the year. The second was to keep myself accountable – and that worked I only missed writing 18 days all of last year. The third reason and what I am planning to focus this blog post on was to monitor my writing.

Writing down my writing meant that I was able to go back, evaluate when I write best and what type of writing is timed at different times in the week. See the table below.

Day	Total	Average
Monday	42426	848.52
Tuesday	46492	948.82
Wednesday	25975	530.10
Thursday	40335	806.70
Friday	36601	732.02
Saturday	61011	1220.22
Sunday	82640	1652.80
	335480	962.74

So looking at this table –

You can straight away see that Wednesday is my worst writing day. This is most likely due to the fact that it is the middle of the working week, and to a certain extent feeling tired has an impact. Also by Wednesday, I have usually been ahead of my word count goal for the week with my efforts not to fall behind on Monday or Tuesday, so I felt that it was okay (for lack of a better term) to slack off with my writing a bit.

Another lower word count day was Friday and that was almost to be expected. Friday night were made for chilling quite simply put and writing does not always fit with chilling.

The final thing of note, Sunday also out preformed Saturday’s word count. I put this down to the football factor and not writing while I am listening to the football, which takes away a lot of time on a Saturday.

The important thing with understand the table and the day’s output (which I have briefly explained above), I have been able to use it to inform my targets for this year’s word count.  Namely, I have upped my work evening word count goals to 600 word, which given last year’s average, I hit everyday but Wednesday; keep my Saturday goal at 1000 words and up my Sunday goal to 1500. And since I know I was above the average last year for these goals, I have no fear in doing this.

In terms of what I wrote on days, I found that I was better off when I started a new chapter on a weekend and added details to that chapter on week nights or did editing. I guess this is also down to work fatigue getting in the way of new ideas.

For those that are interested, I also monitored my monthly word counts – see table below and found that while I struggled to write the nanowrimo goal on all but one month, I was perfectly capable of writing over 25,000 each month that adds up to a hell of a lot more than just doing nanowrimo for one month a year.

	Words Estimated	Words Written	Words Over/Under	Word Average Per Day	Word Average Per Week	Writing Days
Janurary	20500	22123	1623	713.65	4916.22	31
February	18000	21740	3740	776.43	5435.00	28
March	20000	25223	5223	813.65	5605.11	31
April	19000	27533	8533	917.77	6403.02	30
May	50000	53355	3355	1721.13	11856.67	31
June	22500	39616	17116	1320.53	9213.02	30
July	19500	25105	5605	809.84	5578.89	31
August	20500	20759	259	669.65	4613.11	28
September	21000	22964	1964	765.47	5340.47	27
October	20000	26979	6979	870.29	5995.33	31
November	50000	39070	-10930	1302.33	9086.05	30
December	20500	11013	-9487	355.26	2447.33	19
	301500	335480	33980	919.67	6374.19	347

And guess all that needs saying to finish this post, is that I encourage you all to monitor your words and revaluate them as for me it has given me my most productive writing year, ever!