Tracking Your Writing Progress
If you’re going to improve at anything you have to put in the work. When I played sports, I would spend hours in the batting cage and on the field doing hitting and catching drills just to get a tiny bit better. Progress takes an enormous amount of time and effort, and the closer you get to achieving a goal or unlocking a new skill the more work you have to put in. Though the repetitions may look a little different, I’ve seen a similar pattern with writing. Every time I sit down to write I’m making progress in becoming a better writer, as well as my current project.
The thing about progress though is that when you’re in the thick of it, it can be difficult to see just how far you’ve come—especially if you continue to run up against obstacles (old or new). In these moments, perspective is crucial because it’s going to help you stick with it. To help me keep things in perspective, I like to track my progress. Tracking progress can take different forms. You can track word count, how many queries you’ve sent, or how many hours you wrote. Personally, I’ve decided to use a simple “yes” or “no” system. To track my progress, I use the calendar in my Moleskine planner.
Side note: You can use any kind of calendar (physical or digital), but the point here is to use something you look at every day.
At the start of 2022, my goal was to track my writing throughout the whole year because I wanted to make a habit of tracking my progress. If I wrote, I colored in the date on my calendar. If not, I left it blank. In 2021, I started to do this but quickly fell off. This year though, I’m proud to stay I’ve kept it up and the habit is now cemented.
Looking ahead to 2023, I’m looking for ways to improve my tracking. One way I’m looking to do this is to pay closer attention to the type of writing I’m doing each day, rather than a general “yes” or “no” answer. Leafing through my Moleskine, I know that not all the days I colored in were dedicated to writing fiction. Some days were spent writing book reviews and blog posts, while others were dedicated to freelance work. I’m not upset about this, but I want to get a better idea of what my writing pie chart looks like, because this can help me better understand where my time and energy are going and give me perspective.
Admittedly, I started building this into my routine starting in November. But doing so has given me time to see if I like this approach. Granted, all I’m doing is coloring in boxes, but when you’re tracking progress it’s easy to get bogged down by too many variables. For instance, I could very easily track:
If I wrote that day
What kind of writing did I do (e.g., book reviews, blog posts, fiction, freelance copywriting)
How long I wrote for
How many words
But to track this every single day would turn into a tedious task and actually discourage me from tracking my progress at all. So m plan is to stick to the high-level items:
Did I write? Yes / No
What kind of writing did I do?
These two variables keep me motivated and offer me the data I need and want. However, if you like getting into the nitty-gritty, I would encourage you to dive deeper. Just because getting into the nitty-gritty doesn’t work for me, it may work for you. The point is to find a way to track your progress in a way that keeps things in perspective, so you can make informed adjustments to your writing routine.
