Sometimes it’s nice to be married to an engineer. My guy knows his way around Excel, which is a good thing for me, because I come up with the strangest ideas on what I want to track.
Now, I know many creatives aren’t data-driven. Numbers are not always our friends. But I am a strange mixture of left and right brain, and I like to see things in charts, color-coded and neat. I also like to have the computer do the math for me, so that’s where Excel (and my husband) is handy.
Since publishing is a business, I think many writers use Excel (or something similar) to track things such as inventory or where we have submitted our work. Some may also use it to track income and expenses, although accounting programs will do this for you.
However, I also use Excel for other, more writerly tracking. My To-Do list is an Excel spreadsheet, broken into columns for different tasks (Writing, Editing, Marketing, etc.). I then list the tasks in the columns and color code them—red, yellow, and green. When they are complete, I gleefully delete them. This way I can see at a glance what my priority should be on any given day.
I also use Excel in the writing process. In my current WIP, I have 3 POV characters, so I charted the entire story to ensure I didn’t “lose” someone’s thread for a long period of time. Again, I color –coded each individual so I could quickly see large gaps.
After I write my first draft, I will sometimes list each scene in Excel in the first column, then use further columns to track characters, arcs, and tension (although I think I will try this method from Roz Morris in my next WIP). This helps me see what scenes may not be needed, are not working, or need to be in a different place in the manuscript. It also allows me to see when scenes are missing because one scene does not lead logically to the next.
Lately, I have been using Excel as a motivational tool. I am motivated by specific, numerical goals. I like to be in competition with myself to reach those goals. I also like to track my work to see where I fall off in productivity and why. Since one of my goals for 2016 is to get back to focusing on writing, I decided to track my Word Count.
Now, I break Word Count into 3 phases: Drafting, Rewrite/Revise, and Copyedit/Proofread. The Drafting count is usually the lowest, since it takes the most time for me to think about and get words down. The Revise/Rewrite I can do more words in less time because I’m working with words already there (and probably adding to them—I tend to write first drafts short). Copyedit/Proofread I can burn up the computer because I can get through that process fast—even though I read it out loud at that stage.
So when I tell you what my Word Counts are, the totals combine all those and can therefore seem very high. For instance, my total Word Count for January was 96,333. Wow, that’s a whole book! No, not really. My Drafting count was 5,772, my Revise/Rewrite was 27,642, and my Copyedit/Proofread was 62,919.
By comparison, my February Word Count to date is only 25, 259. I figure I will end somewhere around 35,000, because most of my work this month is the Rewrite/Revise and Drafting categories.
In the same sheet where I’m keeping this running word count, I have my projects broken out—separate columns for my 2 novel-length WIPs, my blog, and Other (one-offs such as short stories, interviews, etc.). I want to try to get a handle on how long it takes me to get through each section of a novel-length WIP so I can be more realistic about how fast I can push the work out. That’s why tracking by project as well as for the whole year is important—because I have a feeling that the summer months, when my child is home all day, will see a drastic plunge in my productivity.
Having these numbers in color-coded detail (I coded each phase) helps urge me on. Watching the numbers pile up motivates me. I have some zero-word days (mostly weekends), but being able to see how much I accomplished during the week allows me to take those days in stride. Less stress is a beautiful thing.
For me, spreadsheets help motivate me and keep me focused. What tools do you use to track your productivity?
Anxiety or Burnout? The mystery of my missing motivation
I am normally a self-motivated person. I know what I want to accomplish and I get it done. All my life I have been a workhorse, churning out whatever work I needed to do—homework, work work, video production, writing. But for some reason, I have been highly unmotivated lately.
All I’ve really wanted to do is retreat into my genealogy hobby and shut out the rest of the world. Forgetting all my other responsibilities sounds good, as does sleeping for a week. I have projects I want to write, but apparently not enough to actually sit down and do them. I’ve been reading very little as well. I just feel exhausted inside and out.
Sounds a lot like burnout. Unfortunately, all of those symptoms are also signs of my anxiety. So which is it?
It could be anxiety. I have plenty of social and political stressors in my life right now—stressors I haven’t had before. My overall anxiety level has been higher than usual—I lay awake at night with crazy scenarios of catastrophe running through my head. Professionally, I am in that place where the last writing project is complete and I need to start a new one. That spot can be thrilling—but it can also be scary. Which project to pick? What if it doesn’t go well? A novel is a long-term commitment, I want to be sure I’m putting my time into the right project. I’m also querying, which in itself is not too stressful, but…what if someone actually wants to represent me? Wonderful, of course, but it would be a new chapter, a big change—and sometimes the fear of success is as paralyzing as the fear of failure.
It could be burnout. I haven’t had a real vacation in almost two years. What do you mean? I hear people saying. You’ve posted beach photos. You’ve been on vacation! I hear you. But that’s not the type of vacation I had in mind. A “real” vacation, for me, is when there’s nobody around. No husband, no child, no deadlines, no nothing. Just me. Now, I love my family, and I enjoy my work, but I am a classic textbook introvert. I need absolute solitude to truly recharge myself. My husband is wonderful and tries to get me some alone time on the weekends so I can relax, but it’s never quite enough (especially because I often spend it working, LOL). I am fast approaching the point where I have no social reserves left—and that saps energy from my creative well.
So which is it? I don’t know. The truest answer is, perhaps, both. I need to dig out of it, but am not quite sure how. I have joined a book club just to get myself reading (and reading outside my usual genres). The answer may be as simple as just making myself write. Just sit down and write something. Anything. Or maybe I need some outside accountability. After all, I submit my blogs on time.
I will slog through this morass as I have every other one, because I am nothing if not persistent. And I know all things come to an end, this slump included.
How do you re-motivate yourself when you hit a motivation desert?