{"id":850,"date":"2012-01-18T15:00:36","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T21:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/?p=850"},"modified":"2012-01-17T21:22:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T03:22:47","slug":"tracking-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/18\/tracking-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, Jamie Todd Rubin posted about how he tracks his writing progress with Evernote and a Google spreadsheet<\/a>. (If you’re interested in using his method, Margaret McGaffey Fisk has an Excel spreadsheet available for download<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

My column setup is:
\nDate, 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m working on a project in Mathematica<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethshack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}