Can You Improve your Writing Production with a Spreadsheet?

I’ve struggled with motivation and focus in my writing for years. At times, I’d go months without writing anything in the WIP, and that doesn’t get anything published.

I’m also a numbers geek. I love playing with numbers. Quite often when I’m trying to solve a problem, one of the first things I do is make a spreadsheet. It makes me think I’m accomplishing something. One way that manifests itself is that when I’m working on a book, I create a spreadsheet to track how much I write. For instance, from that spreadsheet, I can tell you that it took me 152 writing days to complete the first draft of Don’t Stop Believing, and that those 152 days were spread out over 2,253 calendar days, or just under 7 years. Isn’t that nice? That sounds like worthless data, but it tells me I managed to cram less than 6 months of actual writing into 7 years. That’s pretty atrocious production, and if I’m going to call myself a fulltime writer, I need to work on that.

But it doesn’t really tell me about what else I’m doing. I write emails. I write posts on Facebook and various forums. I write blog posts, too. Doesn’t that writing time and production count for something?

Dean Wesley Smith started a “Writing in Public” series on his blog a while back, where he’s reported his writing production on a daily basis. As of December 31st, he had reported it for 870 days straight. I looked at several posts in that series and realized I could probably do something like that too.

Obviously I don’t have quite the audience Dean has. He’s written somewhere north of a gazillion books, and people pay him to learn about writing. So I’m not going to draw the same kind of audience on posts about my writing production that he does. But I can do something like what he does to increase my awareness of my writing time and production.

So I started another spreadsheet, of course.

It’s fairly simple. I have four columns: Blog; Fiction; WIP; and Non-fiction. WIP is whatever big fiction project I happen to be working on; at the moment it’s the third book in the Sad Girl series, with a working title of In Plain Sight. That count will be separate from the Fiction label, which will otherwise count any fiction writing that I produce, like short stories. Non-fiction includes Facebook, Reddit, and forum posts, emails, school assignments – anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories.

Have I learned anything from tracking my writing so far? Wednesday seems to be my most productive day overall, with about 22% of all writing coming on Hump-day. Monday comes in at about 15%. I suspect those two days rank highest because of school assignments that were due on Tuesday and Thursday. Not that I’m still a last-minute student or anything. Sunday and Wednesday were my busy blogging days. Monday and Thursday were my best fiction days.

So why should you track your writing production? I’m doing it for motivation, and accountability. I want to see how much I’m actually writing. Plus, writing it down somewhere lets me set a goal, and figure out if I’ve met it. Right now, it’s telling me that I’ve spent 40% of my writing production on fiction and non-fiction, and 20% on the blog. Is that a decent balance? It seems like it, for now. But the only way I can decide that for sure is to keep tracking it. I just have to make sure that the spreadsheet doesn’t become more important than the writing.

My ending word counts for 2015:

• Blog: 22,486 words
• Fiction: 44,669
• WIP: 6,756
• Non-Fiction: 46,244
• Total: 112,870 – This works out to about 1/10^th impulse speed on DWS’s “Pulp Speed” scale.

Around July of last year, I posted a widget in the top left of the sidebar, and started updating it weekly. I’ll continue to do that this year, and into the future. I’m going to keep that up, mainly to keep myself honest and aware of how I’m using my time. I hope other writers will find some inspiration from my little project.