Tracking writing: words or time spent?

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I’ve been underutilizing Beeminder for a few years, currently only tracking my time spent on Focustime.
I’d like to start a goal for writing but am torn between tracking output in words or in time spent. Planning, thinking, and outlining are big parts of my projects but don’t produce a ton of actual words; similarly the editing stage takes time, but if anything reduces word counts.
The other factor in my thinking is that actual word count tracking isn’t that straightforward to incorporate into Beeminder. I write text in Scrivener and outline in OmniOutliner. I know there are ways to track Scrivener output, but maybe just tracking time spent would make more sense? Wondering how others resolved this dilemma.

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Something you could try is just using multiple metrics to track the same overall work

I wondered about this myself, so over time for my main / day job I’ve added 3 tracking goals:

  • Number of tasks completed per day (say 40 a day)
  • Number of super hard / anxiety-inducing tasks (say 1 a day)
  • Time tracked doing specific tasks

It’s been interesting so far seeing the data come in – I think I had worried a bit that I might start inflating my raw # of low-quality tasks, so I wanted a way to guarantee certain benchmarks for time & high impact tasks over the long-run.

In practice what I’ve found:

  • Time is actually pretty solid, even when subjectively I don’t “feel” like I’ve been doing as much as I should, in practice I am getting a solid 5 hours of applied work in every day (more than I was expecting tbh, solid amount for quality, focused work in my book)
  • The “super hard / anxiety-inducing tasks” goal is really not that big a deal, and observing there’s usually only 1 / day on average makes me do them sooner in the day to just “eat the frog” if you will
  • The “easiest” goal (raw # of tasks) is probably enough and will likely remain my main pace-driving tool

TLDR:

Overall I don’t find it adds much overhead or distraction to have 3 goals for the same thing (because I always tend to focus on just 1 of them), and the confidence that I am consistently on the right track is really nice.

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I want to second @lambo and suggest tracking both time spent and word count. For me, it has been helpful to have backup metrics and goals for important aspects of my life.

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I hadn’t thought about the value of tracking both. Are there any useful integrations for tracking time spent on a task on the computer, or is the best approach to manually enter data?

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I have been using Toggl for a while. It’s not as automatic as RescueTime, you have to turn the timer on and off but then the integration takes care of the rest and automatically updates the Beeminder goal.

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I have this problem as well and I don’t have an answer on how to beemind it besides just a “do daily brainstorming” goal.

At the end of the day the only thing that really matters when it comes to writing is the actual words that you write. Yes planning and all that is super important obviously, but it won’t matter if you don’t actually write. As a result, I think it’s best to just simply track number of words written per day and keep all of the supporting work as an untracked but still necessary habit that supports, and enables, the writing habit.

Additionally if you commit to the writing it helps you avoid being a planner-procrastinator