Being the geek and scientist that I am, I started tracking my stats at the beginning of the year. The first couple of months, it was just... tracking. I wanted to see if I could incorporate the data collection itself into my daily routine. I am using a very simple google sheet for this. Yesterday, I even figured out how to make it spit out a chart, which was fun. Now, I should try and figure out how to cross link sheets and generate data based on more than one month...
But for now, I'm pleased with myself. I set a goal in March, to write fiction every single day. I met the goal. My wordcount total isn't great, but it's better than it has been.
I do still write more non-fiction than fiction in terms of total words, but that is because of Mad Genius Club. I don't blog here every day, and I often blog 'short' here. Over at MGC I try hard to hit a thousand words, and sometimes I get more, sometimes less. The average is rather a lot, taken over a month. Plus if I do a MGC blog and a blog here, well, that's the outlier on March 9. Also, that's before I got sick.
So my goal in April is not only to write daily, but to continue that nice upward trend of the red bars. So why am I doing this? Because I am tracking my productivity. And tracking means looking at it. Data not collected is not data. I can say 'oh, last week was a great week!' but now I have the numbers to tell me if that's true. Humans are creative at their ability to mislead themselves. Plus, it gives me a great incentive to drag myself over to the computer even when I don't want to do anything, and start writing.
But now, I'm off to the day job. Writing tonight, though!