I’ve developed a Google Spreadsheet 3 for providing metrics on my performance against my goal. Also, I only do this for first draft material. Because I’m interesting in that kind of thing. This is so that I can go back and see what it was I was writing on Thursday, January 12, 2012. I have sufficient local and cloud-based backups for my fiction. Usually, when I finish up a Scrivener session, I copy the text that I wrote and paste it into a note in my Evernote notebook. That note contains a copy of the fiction I wrote in that day. I have a Notebook in Evernote called “Daily Fiction Writing.” There is one note for each day I write. I find it interesting to be able to go back and see what I wrote on any given day. If the notification hasn’t popped up, I haven’t met the goal yet. I write in full-screen mode, by the way, so I don’t have other distractions, and so the Growl notification is particularly convenient because it means I don’t have to keep checking how far along I am. Sometimes I’ll stop there, and sometimes I’ll keep going. So I sit down and write and write and then Growl pops up and says that I’ve passed my 500 word target. I also have it configured to use Growl to notify me when I’ve met the goal. I’ve recently revised my short story project template 2 to automatically have a 500 word/session target.

Scrivener is my workhorse, and where I do 95% of my fiction-writing 1. There are generally three tools that combine to help me meet my writing goals each day: 1. I thought it might be of interest how I go about tracking this goal in case anyone else out there is looking to do the same.

That means that the goal must be measurable, and this years writing goals certainly meet that criteria: write 500 words of new fiction every day. I’ve found that the best way to meet goals that I set for myself is to track them.

Word count in evernote mac