Now that the muse has come back and I have made serious time to write because writing help keeps the black dog of depression at bay, I’ve been looking for ways to be more productive and track my productivity. Later this week I’m going to block about how excel helps me stay more productive, and if you saw my spreadsheet with projects, not just for Mary Winter and W.M. Kirkland, but for a couple of other pen names I have because I cannot write one story at a time, haha… well you might faint. Or be shocked. Or both!
I have loved Scrivener since I started using it, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a godsend to authors, and I haven’t explored it’s book formatting and creation tools. I use Jutoh for that.
What I do love is Project Targets. You see, my spreadsheet tracks 1000 words per project, so that’s my daily goal. I can use the word count listed at the bottom of the screen, but that requires remembering where I started and doing math and stuff. With Project Targets, I can write. I get a nifty progress bar,
Let’s take a look at Mated to the Wild, the free story that I’m offering for my newsletter subscribers. When I click CTRL+, (that’s control + comma for windows pcs), it brings up this pretty box that I hover in the upper right hand corner. I can see for the entire book (Or in the case of my short stories like for 2 Hearts Rescue, the total number of words written on those stories. Perfect for figuring out if I have enough for a boxed set.)
The session target is for the writing session. In this way, I can track the words I’m writing for the session without worrying about math, where I was, or even how many words I’d written. It does the calculations for me.
I find this little tool helps me to stay focused on my writing, and even gives me encouragement because I can see how many words I had written. If you’re not using project targets within Scrivener, I encourage you to do so. Perhaps you’ll find that it helps your productivity too.
