The Months the Records Fell

In the early days of the pandemic, when the uncertainty and newness of the situation was bearing down on me in full force, I talked about here on several occasions how it had been killing my productivity. I wrote almost nothing for the entire month of March and felt only spurious signs that I would ever get out of this funk.

Months have passed, and I’m happy to say the writing funk has not only passed, but transformed itself into a frenzy, as evidenced by the last four months of my bullet journal productivity tracker:

This productivity tracker is one my favourites, obviously not because it’s pretty or elegant, but because it gives me such a good bird’s eye view snapshot of how much I’ve accomplished. I’ve introduced it in more detail in an earlier entry, but the basic summary of how it works is: the little numbers on the left-hand side represent the day of the month, and each column is devoted to a type of writing activity. The dots in the boxes means that I didn’t do that particular activity that day, a checkmark means I did, and a number represents the specific word count, if applicable.

As you can see, April was still a recovery month from the doldrums of March. The later months are much stronger, while the heavy stretch in July represents some of the best writing weeks of my life. Those last couple of weeks, I routinely hit more than a thousand words per day, which I know for some writers is the bare minimum goal, but for me is a relatively rare occurrence. I don’t really have set goals per day though I have an idea of how many words I want to hit based on how busy the day is going to be or the headspace I’m at. I’ve talked before how I’m not really a believer in daily word counts as I think there’s a risk that they become counterproductive for a writer. As you can see from the bujo spread – I usually take weekends off, and even though I have discovered time to write on the weekends, they tend not to be my most productive days.

I did however, recently implement weekly writing goals for my specific projects. Since I’m juggling so many at once, I find that tracking a reasonable weekly goal helps me make sure that none of them slip through the cracks, so I find these, on a balance, to be more of a motivator than a demotivator. Not to mention that it also helps me to keep on top of the buffer for The Bloodlet Sun, since I promised myself I won’t be dropping the ball on its updates this time.

The previous time I talked about this particular bullet journal tracker – I didn’t include word counts and the whole thing was checkmarks. Switching to word counts had actually helped me immensely with my weekly word count goals. I made a few attempts to track my weekly goals in my Moleskine notebook instead, but they were too disorganized to stick. Instead, looking at the word count in the project columns of my bujo tracker gives me a real quick look into which projects have reached their goals and which ones need more work, allowing me to prioritize and vary throughout the week, something that has helped me immensely with writer’s block.

One last thing I want to mention about this particular spread, is that in June you will see I added a new column for “Dad Project”. I lost my dad three years ago to cancer, and we had a complicated relationship, so I’m using this for now to reflect and I’m still experimenting with how it will develop.
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So as you can see, the tracker is also customizable in terms of projects as these can be added and dropped every time you fill in the columns for each month. This is just one way to track writing productivity, and I hope you might be able to take some inspiration from it.

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