Progress Tracking for Authors

This guest post was written by Del Hargraves.

This post is part of Week 4 in Prose in Progress 2025, a three-month series of writing encouragement and gentle guidance for your creative season.

What is Tracking?

Anyone who thinks about being an author likely has heard of tracking, in one form or another. Often, writers use word counts. Daily, weekly, or monthly goals. How many words is the story at its end? How many is too many, or too few? Why track at all?

To start with the last, it can be highly motivating to see how much you’ve accomplished since you’ve begun. Maybe your final draft is 75k words, but you find that you actually wrote a total of 100k to get there! Or you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, writing a few minutes here and there in the business of life, and find that you’ve hit 5k words in a week—which is no small feat. Or, maybe this is your first time writing and you’re just trying to build that writing muscle. Setting a specific goal (250 words) in a set timeframe (6 days per week), and having a way to see if you’re making it or not, can be great for adjusting your approach if needed.

Tracking showed me that I can consistently write 500 words most days. It allows me to have realistic expectations for myself, for my writing, around working a full-time job, having friends, and juggling other priorities. I can tick that 500 words off my to-do list a few times per week, and move on without guilt for ‘not writing enough.’

Now, how does one track?

I’m an author. But I’m also a data nerd—my background is in wildlife biology, and I love a good analysis. Don’t get me started on graphs and statistics.

Unless you’re scribbling stories on pen and paper, whatever word processor you’re using to write includes at least a basic word count. Word and Google Docs show total words, or how many you have selected. Scrivener has words per document, and words for the project, and makes an attempt at tracking words per day (which I find is not that reliable, personally).

If you’re interested in tracking your own projects, whether it’s short stories or epic novels, there’s two major ways to go about it:

1. Use a tracker that’s based online or through an app. A quick search shows quite a few, with different pros and cons to each. If you want to track with minimal set up, look them up and see if any strike your fancy. Often they will track your stats for you, as long as you input your word count for the session/day.
   
2. Make your own tracker. This is my preferred method, since I’m a very particular person and prefer choosing my own input, statistics, graphs, colors, etc. This can be done through digital spreadsheets. I prefer Excel or Google Sheets, though you can make trackers in Notion or LibreOffice’s spreadsheets as well. Keep in mind that each version uses slightly different formulas, so you can’t just copy and paste from one into another.

Making Your Own Tracker

First, decide what and how you want to track. I do my tracking on a per-story basis. Each story gets its own tracker. You can even make trackers for each draft. For a novel, I’ll make an Excel spreadsheet with a page for each draft, so everything for the same novel is in one place.

However, Microsoft costs money and is… well, it is. Lately.

For this walkthrough, I’ll use Google Sheets, since it’s free. This is a fairly detailed first draft tracker for a novel, where you’re only adding words, and not removing them to the degree you would for revisions or edits.

In case you aren’t familiar, when looking at spreadsheets, rows are numbers and columns are letters. For example, Column A, Row 3 will be referred to as A3.

This is what my final spreadsheet looks like:

How to Get There

First, set up the column names. I like the following order:

A1 is Date. You can choose to omit days you don’t write, that’s up to you. It might affect how the formulas are set up. This tracker assumes days with 0 words are omitted.

B1 is Net Words, the total words you’ve added to your manuscript that day.

C1 is Current WC. Current total word count—the total number of words in your manuscript. If you’re writing in Word, this number should match your word count for the document.

D1 is Comments, which are useful for tracking what made one day really good, or what made one day really low. I’ll note if I had a migraine or emergency come up that cut into my writing time, or if I had an unexpected day off which meant extra writing time.

Next, set up the first few columns.

Column A, Dates. A2 should be your first writing day. I like to click and drag to easily extend the dates down instead of manually entering them all.

Column B, Net Words. Here is where you input your total number of words added to the manuscript each day.

Column C, Current WC. Now we get to the first formula! This column automatically sums the numbers you input in Column B. In C2, write  =B2  This makes whatever number you set for your first day of writing appear as your first current word count.

In C3, write =C2+B3 This will add your first total to your second day’s net word count.

If you click and drag down, as we did for the dates, it will auto-fill, moving down a row each time. Below, you can see the highlighted cell, C8, shows the total for all the days as 1310, and the formula for that cell is at the top, =C7+B8

If all you want to track is your words per day and total word counts, there you go! That’s everything you need.

For the hardcore nerds, there’s more.

Tracking Overall Completion

I believe each book should be just as long as it needs to be. Goal draft counts are a loose target that may move closer or further depending on the story. I’m a severe underwriter, so I set a goal of 82,500 to push myself closer towards a full novel in my first drafts.

In Rows F and G, I track overall progress.

F1 is End Goal—the ultimate word count goal.
F2 is Current Word Count
F3 is Removed.

Part of my writing process is to go back over what I’ve written before I start putting more words down, and sometimes that means I end up tweaking and removing words. To keep track of that, I put all my removed words into a separate document, and track the number of words removed here—so I have total number of words written at the end of the project, or year, or whenever.

G1 is number for the word goal. G2 is another formula, tallying how many words have been written. =sum(B2:B)   If you look at what’s highlighted when you input that formula, you’ll see that all of Column B is highlighted except for the header, Net Words. This means that whenever you add more numbers, it will automatically update without you having to adjust the formula.

In H1, I wrote % Remaining, and in H2, I wrote % Completed. I prefer having the completed and current lined up, but you’re going to input the formula for I2 first, =(G2/G1)*100

Spreadsheets are very strict on order of operations, so make sure you have the right number of parentheses, and that those parentheses indicate what you want to happen first, going from most inside to out.

Then, you’ll input I1, which is =100-I2.

One thing I’ll comment on, is for readability, change the format on these percentage cells. Since the formula multiplies by 100, it’s already in percent form without the symbol. To minimize extra numbers after the decimal point, select the cells, choose Format > Number > Number.

Writing Days and Average Word Counts

If you’re curious about the number of days you spend writing and are curious about your average word count per day, here’s how to set that up:

In F5, input the label Writing Days. In F6, input the label Avg WPD (average words per day). In G5, input the formula =count(B2:B)  This counts the days you have inserted word counts into. In G6, input =average(B2:B)

Tracking Weekly Goals

In F10, input the label Date. In G10, Word Goal. In H10, Actual.

You can either use the numerical dates, as in Column A, or manually enter text and numbers, as I have.

This table is set up assuming I have a word count goal of 250 words per day for 6 days each week, and I’m starting to write on Oct 1. I manually input 250 in G11. G12 has the formula =(250*6)+G11  After that, I was able to select and drag down to autofill the formula through G15.

Under Actual, input the cell from Column C that corresponds to the day, because that will have the total count. In H11, I put =C2  H12, =C9.

You can add another column for differences (actual – word goal or word goal – actual), or change the dates to monthly instead of weekly, as long as what you choose to put after the = in the formulas is adjusted to match.

Graphs

In the first screenshot, you can see a doughnut chart.  I selected the below:

Then you choose insert, chart.  It’ll look like this to start with:

Which, ew. To fix it up, go to Chart type on the right, and choose doughnut chart from the drop down menu. While still in the Setup of Chart Editor, under Label, choose H1:H2 if you want the chart to read % Remaining, % Completed. Then, you can choose colors and fonts under Customize. Most of the changes I made are under Pie Slice, where you can choose separately from the dropdown, End Goal or Remaining. The title was added under Chart and Axis titles.

You can also make other graphs to show your daily word counts, or weekly or monthly.

Color Coding

Finally, you may be wondering about the color coding. On the net words. I like to have a visual for if I’ve met my word count goal or not. I selected colors to represent if I met it, if I didn’t, or if I wrote extra. Each one is updated manually which yes, is quite a bit extra and totally unnecessary. I added a color coding chart in Column K to reference. All the headers are colored in to make the sections more easily distinguishable, and I picked colors I liked. The Draft (x) Progress chart’s colors are Green for progress, and dark purple for not done yet. I don’t like assigning red or other colors that have ‘negative’ associations with them to the days I don’t meet my word count, or for the words I haven’t written yet, since that feels closer to punishment and no one needs that energy. Some days you’re not going to meet your goals, and that’s totally okay! And the colors I chose reflect that.

Setting this up in Excel is very similar, with a slightly different formulas and ways of making the graph. You can set up the basic tracking in Notion as well, though I’m not certain how the graphs would work and you might need to adjust the layout of the mini-tables. Note: I call them tables because that’s how they’re laid out, they are not tables according to Excel or Sheets—that’s a different way of interacting with the cells that I’m not bothering with. While setting this up I would get the prompts to convert the cells to table, and I select ‘no’ every time.

In Conclusion

You can get really into the weeds on tracking. When you’re past the first draft and into revisions, you might want to track chapters or pages revised instead of word counts, or add a column for words added and words removed. The ways to track your writing are limitless, and entirely personal. Or, you can not track at all and just write! There’s no wrong way to go about it.

May your words flow free,

Del

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To learn more about Del, her published stories, and her upcoming works, visit her website.