Ever wondered which day of the week you’re most productive on? Or which project you’ve spent the most time writing? Or even just what your average words per minute is? This free writing diary will do all of that and more!

At a glance…

This is a Google Doc that you can copy and use to track your writing goals and progress. It will automatically calculate words per minute, daily writing total, words per project and more, and it can be modified to do just about anything you want with your writing data.

Backstory

I’m a writer, but I’m also a bit of a data/tracking nerd, so I built this daily word count tracker for my writing group about a year ago and we’ve been using it ever since. We use it to track our progress and motivate each other to keep writing.

Who’s this for?

Anyone. But particularly people that want an easy way to track their writing progress and totals.

You might be REALLY into your writing data, or you might just want to see a cool graph of your writing at the end of the year.

What does it do?

Calculates and displays writing totals, charts, and graphs based on what you input.

It can be as detailed as you want it to be. I use it to track hourly writing sprints with project specific tags, but I know people who use it for simple, rough daily writing tracking by entering their estimated totals at the end of every day.

 

How does it work?

You enter your writing totals and the time you spent writing. It does the rest.

I added an explainer to the document, so hopefully it will be easy to understand how to use it even if you’re new to spreadsheets or gdocs.

 

It looks complicated!

It really isn’t! It takes five seconds to add a new entry if you know the hotkeys and everything should just calculate automatically after that.

 

Why use this tracker?

It depends what’s important to you. I personally love it because it is both eminently modifiable and as private as I want it to be. Track (or don’t track) anything you want. Share (or don’t share) anything you want. Learn a bit of “Excel” and you can expand this into anything.

Have questions or recommendations?

Please email us at admin@bookspry.com or reach us on twitter

Also, I’m a writer not a…spreadsheeter, so there are probably formulas that could be optimised, etc. I’m always happy to hear about ways to improve it. Let me know if you see something.

That’s it. Hopefully you find it useful. Keep writing!