Recently, Jamie Todd Rubin posted about how he tracks his writing progress with Evernote and a Google spreadsheet. (If you’re interested in using his method, Margaret McGaffey Fisk has an Excel spreadsheet available for download.)
I have a similar spreadsheet that I (used to) use for novel first drafts. But for over a year now, I’ve been tracking my writing in Bento. This is the same program that I use to keep a list of projects and track my submissions, and it’s convenient to have it all in one place.
Bento is a slightly simplified database program–you can’t directly hook things together (so I have to manually tell it to associate a “submission” entry to a “project” entry, but this is very easy to do).
I’ve mostly been tracking time spent, rather than word count, so that I can include planning and revision time as well. I only added a word count column and a “wrote new words today” checkbox a couple months ago, because I’d like to be producing more new stuff.
My column setup is:
Date, Project (the name of a novel, “Short Stories”, or “None” for critting or writing classes), Task (writing, revising, critting, etc), Duration (in minutes), Notes (where I type in what story I worked on, or whatever else I feel like noting), Word count (duh), New words (checked if I created new stuff, unchecked if I didn’t).
For the most part I don’t actually look at the data much. I can do basic searches to figure out how many hours I spent on X project in December, or how many hours Y short story took. The latter is something that’s becoming useful to know for planning purposes, though it doesn’t account for fermenting time.
I’m working on a project in Mathematica that will let me do a bunch more analysis and make pretty charts, but it’s been going in fits and starts. To be honest it’s more of a learn-Mathematica project than a improve-writing-productivity project (which I want to do because, and here is the disclaimer, I work for the company that makes it). I’ve nearly duplicated the functionality I’ve been getting from Bento’s search results.
For the next novel first draft, I will probably just type word counts into Bento and use Scrivener’s session targets instead of going back to my Excel spreadsheet. One less thing to mess with.
Dear Elizabeth, If I could find your email address I could invite you to the private beta of the Mathematica StackExchange site. In any case you will now get notification when it goes public next week, because you have followed the proposal.
Thanks, Verbeia. I didn’t feel I could commit to answering or asking a certain number of questions during the private beta, but I plan to check out the public one.
Fair enough – but if I invite you now that the private beta has started, I don’t think you need to commit. Email me at myhandle @ myhandle . com and I can send you an invitation. Computational linguistics/writing is an area that people enjoy seeing questions about, but there is only one computational linguist on the site so far that I know of. I think the kinds of questions you will ask will be good experience for the rest of us to try to answer.
When I remember to track it at all, I’m still tracking mine in the same MySQL database that I run the rest of my writer site off of. I suppose learning MySQL and PHP is probably overkill for almost every writer out there, but I get a real kick out of it. Besides, when I need a break from writing I can code writer’s tools and silly online games.