Augment your word count goals with percentage based benchmarks for more focused writing

Zucchini percentage (Photo credit: TonalLuminosity)

As I discussed over here, I completely redid my writing goals for 2014. A couple of people have asked me to explain my new system (and I know that other post is mad long) so here’s the TL; DR version.

Instead of just setting a single total work count goal for the year, I set a yearly goal with percentage based benchmarks based on my current needs. For me, this was that over 50% of my writing had to be focused (which means editing or working towards the completion of a draft or revision) and that I needed to stay as close to 50/50 split as possible between fiction and non-fiction. I’m tracking this goal with a simple spreadsheet where I simply input my work count every day under a column for the project (or category if it’s free writing) and it tells me where I current am on track with the year as a whole.

It’s pretty easily adaptable to whatever your needs are. Maybe you’ve got to split your time between blogging and freelancing or non-fiction, script-writing and writing for school work. Maybe you’re in the opposite situation as me and want to challenged yourself to do more free writing instead of working on older projects. The beauty of the percentage system is that it works no matter your word count goal (and it works even if you lower or increase it over the course of the year).

Instead of just saying, “I need to spend more time on x  and less time on y this year” you’re setting measurable number-based goals on what percentage of your writing in the next year is going to which category. And everyone knows that a measurable goal is a more attainable on.

In the more specific, I’ve set up my spreadsheet up to tally up the word counts for all Focused Fiction and Focused Non-Fiction writing as well as Focused versus Free writing and to spit back their percentages in comparison to each other so that I can see at a glance where I am. I’ve used some simple conditional formatting to make the cells turn red or green depending on whether I’m on pace or not because that kind of mental gamifying totally works on me in a big way.

For example, as I write this, 69% of my writing this year has been Focused which is over 50% (which was my goal) so that cell is a happy little green that says I’m doing A-OK. If that number were to slip below 50%, however, it would turn a scary red so that I’d know to course correct. In a similar way, to try to help me keep Fiction and Non-Fiction writing at 50/50, the lesser count turns red while the higher goes green.

Now, instead of just writing with the goal of getting the total up to some arbitrary number of words by the end of the year, when I you sit down to write you’ll be making an informed decision about what you should be working on to achieve the benchmarks you set at the start. It also gives you  a clearer picture of exactly how you spent your writing time over the course of the year.

And let me tell you, it WORKS. But why it works is a topic for another post…