Monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make—and it can even work if you don’t make a plan at all. Weighing yourself every day or keeping a food diary can help you lose weight, just as tracking your purchases will help you spend less. Even a writer who doesn’t share Trollope’s ability to meet daily quota can still benefit just by noting the word count at the beginning and end of the day: The mere knowledge that you’ll have to put down a number will discourage procrastination (or the kind of busywork that might feel virtuous but doesn’t contribute to that word count). The more carefully
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