Sunday 10 January 2016

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!

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