Productivity Tracking: When Organization Goes Bad

Last week, I did an experiment, and it was hell.

I’m not the type of person to be accused of being lazy; I’m prolific, but not because I write fast. Time and time again, I have told people I’m only prolific because I put a lot of work and effort into what I do. So, last week, I decided to track my productivity by hour.

What a pain in my ass. Seriously. I’m glad I did it, I even did it for three full days before I got a serious case of the ‘fuck its!’

Organization is important for me. So are to-do lists. I have a really crappy memory for things outside of my novels. My books consume the vast majority of my attention, and the rest dribbles out of my ears. I had a lot to do to prepare to release Pack Justice, so I needed to make sure I was getting everything done in a timely fashion. (I did succeed at this goal, so I was fantastically productive.)

However, this method was brutal on me. I already work hard–probably too hard–and all this method did was stress me out while making me work even harder. (That is not nearly a good of a thing as it sounds. I got a lot done, but… stress.)

But, since I did it, I thought I’d share what it looked like. I had to deal with interruptions all throughout, but this is a fairly good representation of my standard day, except I scatter it in different clumps rather than neat hour-by-hour representations.

Time
Type
Starting Words
Ending Words
Total Count


11:00 AM
Writing
54843
55692
849


12:00 PM
Writing
55692
56117
425


1:00 PM
Writing
56117
56456
339


2:00 PM
Writing
56456
57076
620


3:00 PM
Writing
57076
57404
328


4:00 PM
Writing
57404
57960
556


5:00 PM
3 CH Proofed





6:00 PM
3 CH Proofed





7:00 PM
4 CH Proofed





8:00 PM
1 CH edited





9:00 PM
Blog Post



















11:00 AM
Writing
57960
58569
609


12:00 PM
Writing
58569
59000
431


1:00 PM
Writing
59000
59391
391


2:00 PM
Writing
59391
59807
416


3:00 PM
Writing
59807
59990
183


4:00 PM
Writing
59990
60358
368


5:00 PM
Writing
60358
61001
643


6:00 PM
Cleaning/Writing
61001
61195
194


7:00 PM
1 CH Edited





8:00 PM
Cleaning/Writing
61195
61574
379


9:00 PM
Writing
61574
61923
349


10:00 PM
Writing
61923
62003
80
















11:00 AM
Writing
62003
62414
411


12:00 PM
3 CH Proofed





1:00 PM
Writing
62414
63223
809


2:00 PM
3 CH Proofed





3:00 PM
Break





4:00 PM
2 CH Proofed





5:00 PM
Writing
63223
63556
333


6:00 PM
3 CH Proofed





7:00 PM
Writing
63556
64145
589


8:00 PM
Writing
64145
64403
258


9:00 PM
Writing
64403
64836
433


10:00 PM
Writing
64836
65414
578


11:00 PM
Writing
65414
65697
283


12:00 AM
2 CH Proofed

 

My average word count is 434 per hour, although I think I’m more comfortable with saying it’s closer to 300 an hour, since I have these random bursts of good hours that skew things; they’re so much more the exception than the rule. I only get so much done because of the number of hours I work, not the speed I work. Realistically, I’m slow.

I’m okay with that. I’m slow, but I’m hard working, and at the end of the day, I do care about results. I push myself really hard because I want to make this career work. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, the only person who is going to force me to make it work is me.

On deadline crunches, I’ll go back to hourly tracking, because it did force me to stay on the ball. For day-to-day life, however… I’ll stick to my regular to-do lists. Those don’t make me want to stab things.