The importance of tracking progress

I think a lot of us get motivated when we see our own improvements and I’m definitely one of those. When I see myself losing weight from a healthier lifestyle, it encourages me to continue because I’ve proven to myself that it works.

There were days when I felt like I’d spent a whole two weeks on a single chapter. I looked at the page number every day, which seemed to tick up ever so slowly and I was more concerned with how many pages I still had left than how many pages I got through each day.

Things took a turn when I started using Notion to track my daily stats. (I’m also using it to store a bunch of resources/research links and deleted parts, notes about characters and locations, etc. but anyway, this is a post about tracking.)

Now, after more than a month of tracking my daily stats, I can very clearly see that though there were good days and not-so-good days, overall I’ve managed more than 100 pages between the first day of February and the last. With all the new scenes I had to write, I think it’s pretty amazing.

Within Notion, I’ve also generated graphical views of the data I entered, and this particular one shows me the page I’m up to at the start of each week:

Thanks to this graph, I’ve been having a bit of a friendly competition with myself each week to see if I could match or beat the previous week’s progress.

I believe that it’s thanks to the tracking that I’ve managed to do more in February than January, despite having had a lot more free time back in January.

I can feel that things are about to take a turn as I face a rockier part of this WIP, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing how March will pan out, with all of the work deadlines coming up and a short family holiday at the end of the month. Fingers crossed I’ll still get very, veeeeeerrrryyyy close to the end?