I'm trying to track my writing progress better this year. I know there are a million "track your writing" tricks and programs out there, but I'm sharing mine in case someone likes it. I like to keep things simple. :) I'm finding it fun because if I write more than my minimum for the day the words I need to write each day to stay on track goes down, which is hugely gratifying. Makes me competitive with myself to bring that number down every day!
This requires a little knowledge of Excel formulas. In Excel or Google Sheets you can set up something like this:
Current Book: The name of your title
Words In: This is where you put your book's TOTAL word count when you're done writing each day.
Want: Is how many words you want in the end.
Need: is how many more you need to reach your goal from the last line. This is the first field that calculates instead of being hand-added by you. The formula is
=SUM(B3-B2)
Where "B3-B2" is Want minus Words In. Depending on in what cells you put this information, the formula changes accordingly. Like if they were all one column over they'd be C3-C2.
PER DAY: is how many words you'd have to write daily to reach your goal by your deadline date. This is another calculation.
=SUM(B4/F9)
B4 in this case, is NEED. The / means divided by... F9. So what's F9? That's where I happened to put the number of days left before my deadline. You can change this number less by one every day, or you can do a calculation that figures it out for you automatically and updates each day to reflect the date.
I'm happy to share that formula, too, so you don't have to change it every day:
F8 is the cell with "january 9th" in it in the picture below. That's the master date all the other calculations use to calculate things. It, itself, is today -1 day, so my stats are for the full day behind me, not the partial day (today) that isn't done yet. (hopefully, that makes sense. At this point, I'm turning myself around over thinking it as I explain! LOL)
9 is what day of the month it is. =DAY(F8) (aka how many days in were are)
22 is how many days left this month to accomplish our goal =EOMONTH(F8,0)-F8 (aka how many days left)
21 is how many days left (the 22 cell aka F7 in this case) minus one day so my writing doesn't count today (F9 mentioned in the article above.)
I feel pretty sure someone is going to tell me math is off but I think this is right! 😂 Works for me!
