 Hello and welcome back to my channel! If you're new here, my name is Jackie and I'm an aspiring writer, and in this video I want to share with you how I'm planning to track my writing in 2021. Now this was inspired by a blog post that Brandon Sanderson does every year called The State of Sanderson, where he goes through the year that's passed and everything that he's put out and his status updates and so on. And I read his update for 2020, and one of the first things he says is, I keep track of this by doing a big spreadsheet, and I thought, I like spreadsheets, I like tracking, and I've done spreadsheets in the past, generally when I'm doing NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo because the website is only really good for tracking word count, and there are other things I want to track. So I thought, why not take my existing spreadsheet and just use it for the whole year? And I thought this would be really interesting for tracking not only the amount I write throughout the year, but how my writing ebbs and flows throughout the year, how productive I am on different projects or how long different projects take, how productive I am at different times of the day or using different tools, and even how productive I am at different stages of my menstrual cycle because last year I did a couple of videos on basically trying to optimize my life and my writing for my menstrual cycle, which I'll link to in the description. So in my spreadsheet, the columns are day and date of course, sleep I actually just added this morning because last night I had a really bad night of sleep. I went to bed and of course immediately had an idea about the story I'm working on. So I ended up giving up on sleeping and writing that. And then when I tried to get back to sleep, it was 1am and our neighbor was shoveling snow at 1am. And one of the problems when you live in a foreign country and can't speak the languages, you can't go out and tell them to stop because I don't have that vocabulary in Russian or Estonian. So that was rather annoying. So last night I slept badly and the reason I'm including that is because obviously your sleep is going to affect your mental performance and it would just be nice to quantify that. The time that I spend writing or working on my projects, the activity, so whether I'm writing, outlining, revising and so on, the productive time. So I have this distinct to the writing session because sometimes you can have a session where you get distracted or you might go into a research black hole and so on. So you might spend three hours at the computer when you were supposed to be writing but only 90 minutes of that was actual writing time. So I want to know how much of the time I'm spending at the computer is productive time. Now, depending on how disciplined I am with tracking that, that is probably going to be not so accurate because in the past when I've tried to do that really accurately, I've had like a pen and paper next to me and every time I've stopped actively writing, I've written down what the time is and every time I start writing again then I write down what the time is so at the end I can go through the session and go okay how much time was actually spent writing. In reality I'm probably not going to do that every time but at the end of a session I have a good idea of okay I spent you know half of that time writing or a third of that time writing or and so on so probably be guesstimating that one. Then of course the words written in a day, I haven't decided whether I'm going to split up the rows into sessions rather than days because some days I might have more than one writing session at the moment I've just got one row per day so words written and then words per minute so that's the number of words divided by the number of productive minutes, number of scenes completed and then the length of the scene this is based on the number of scenes completed divided by the number of words written time to complete the scene. This is something I haven't decided how helpful it is yet but I thought it would be helpful to have more things to measure than just pure word count such as how I'm progressing through scenes. Total time spent so this is the cumulative time I spent writing and working on writing related things throughout the year total words written again cumulative total the project that I'm working on so the project I'm working on at the moment is my fantasy hot mess when that changes to something else obviously there'll be something else in this column cycle phase tools used so at the moment I've got them back into using four the words which is a monster battle writing tool and the reason I have this tools used column is just to see if there are certain tools that work really well for certain activities and getting stuff done and then finally any notes so for the current project it is not a first draft it's a third draft or third and a half draft I'm not really sure but I am writing it that there are some things that I will copy from the last draft such as nice description or some nice dialogue and so on even though I'm expecting the bulk with the book and the organization will be new so one of the reasons why I want to have notes here is because if I have a day when I get really really high words per minute or a really high total word count maybe it's because I copied 5,000 words from the old document so that should be noted so I know the reason for any outliers if there are outliers then on the second tab of the spreadsheet I have my charts so I might add to this over time but at the moment there's a heim tracker which is just the cumulative amount of time total words the daily words so that's a bar where each day you'll see the number of words and it'll be interesting to see how much variation there is over time and then writing efficiency so this is the words per minute I might also come up with some other measures to measure writing efficiency but at the moment words per minute is the best one I've got and that is an overview of how I'm going to be tracking my writing in 2021 so let me know do you use any tools like this to track your writing if so what do you use what are the different things you like to track like word count time spent and so on and are there any other tools or tricks you have for staying focused so that when you have a session it's predominantly productive time rather than you have three hours and only one hour of it was spent writing so please let me know what you used to help with your writing productivity in the comments if you like this video give me a like hit the notification bell hit the subscribe button and I will see you next time bye