A year-and-a-half ago I ran face-first into the buzz-saw of my own semi-distant past. It was one of those moments that leaves you feeling as if you’ve morphed into some awful version of yourself you always dreaded.
I did a blog post about it, “Scaling The Rat Hole,” and of course I recommend reading the whole thing. But if time is tight, here’s the opening, which is all you need for now:
Early last month I had the agonizing good fortune of cracking open a notebook from the mid-1990s.
In one section I’d spent several months following some advice whose source I’ve since forgotten: keeping a log of daily writing progress. One day per line, bonehead-simple entries: date, project(s), page numbers, tally.
Cue reaction, January 2010: Holy hell! Look at those totals!
Comparing then and now, I felt I should’ve scribbled a note to accompany the final entry: “I will diminish, and go into the West.”
It wasn’t that I was no longer making progress on anything. Just not this kind of progress. Not the degree of progress that once constituted normal.
It compelled me to analyze what was different between the two eras. Now, you can’t look at two distinct times of your life as if all other things are equal, but still: Once I started to pay conscious attention to it, I was amazed at the debilitating effect that being continually connected to the Internet was having on my long-term focus.
And it helped. This awareness genuinely helped, and prompted me to start yanking the Ethernet cable when it was time to get to work.
It took roughly another year — yes, sometimes my head has a slow leak — before I realized there was another major factor involved, one so obvious that I’d been staring right at it, literally, yet still failed to grasp its significance:
The progress log itself.
“What Gets Measured Gets Managed”
Those five words are usually attributed to business management consultant Peter Drucker, and they’ve been a mantra in the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds ever since.
Although it may have been meant for companies, it rings with the truth of a universal law that applies equally well to individuals: that keeping track of what we do to attain an objective is likely to keep us on track, and get us there sooner.
It’s why dieters who keep a food journal tend to lose weight more effectively than those who insist, without proof, that they’re eating less.
It’s why gym rats who log the particulars of their workouts tend to get stronger and faster sooner than the ones who show up with nothing to measure themselves against.
Why investors focused on asset allocation know when to rebalance their portfolios.
Why book-lovers who list what they read end up reading even more.
It’s why, if you’re a writer, or any other breed of creator, this brief act of accounting really can help you end up creating more.
And, finally, it’s why I made this 31-day worksheet, which alert readers may recall from “By Request: A Tour Of My Workspace.” It was an easy job, a few minutes in Apple’s Pages program. Any reasonably recent word processing app should be capable of something similar. I print a fresh copy at the beginning of every month, and use it to keep track of the progress I make on the different projects and assignments that I take on. It’s simple, but that’s important: The simpler a method is, the more likely you are to sustain it.
A Painfully Effective Use Of White Space
The earliest known samples of writing are Sumerian cuneiform tablets, and the oldest of them are mostly filled with mundane things like records of grain transactions. Nothing’s changed since: Writing stuff down keeps you honest. Once you’ve written something down, especially numbers, you can’t lie to yourself. Not tomorrow, not even when memory gets hazy.
This cuts both directions.
On the one hand, keeping records makes it easy to see when and where you’ve gone astray. Watching too many days pile up without any sign of word- or page counts, or anemic and sporadic counts, should light a fire under you.
This is why a 31-day worksheet like I whipped up is preferable to a standard notebook. Say, starting today, summer lethargy kicks in and you do nothing for two weeks. With the notebook, when you do finally resume, it’s just the next line. On the worksheet, though, you see that big, glaring block of empty white space.
On the other hand, watching your tallies add up, by the day, by the week, filling up the allotted space … that’s gold. That’s proof of life, evidence of momentum. It becomes its own encouragement to keep going.
And if you’re the type who sometimes finds it tough to give yourself credit for what you’ve done, hard to celebrate the small successes and interim milestones, then here’s a clear testament of what you’ve done. I did this. No one can say I didn’t. The proof is right here.
It’s one of the biggest payoffs you can get for five seconds of your day.
[Photo by Patrick Hoesly]
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Perfectly sums up the challenge for writers today. We are all born procrastinators, hardly able to get going without a looming deadline breathing fire down the back of our necks. We used to sharpen pencils, get new pens, rearrange ink carbons and play with liquid correction fluids ad infinitum, passing off as work while we thought. The web makes it easy to get absorbed into doing ‘nothing’ and feel not too guilty about it as it could turn out to be research. The clear message is that unless we discipline ourselves and produce what we are supposed to, we risk falling short of our own capabilities.
Born procrastinators … there’s a curse upon humanity if I’ve ever heard one.
I was never the fiddle with pens type, but I’m a great one for getting geeky with my Macs: looking for things to delete and organize and optimize and upgrade, running utilities, and other stuff there’s no end to. On the constructive side, I never have downtime because of computer problems.
Thanks for chiming in, David!
Yes, NetSuck is an issue. For me, it tends to cut into reading time.
I really like your suggestion about keeping a writing log, but here’s the thing–the progress I’m making on my novel at the moment is critical to moving forward, but not measurable in word count. I pose myself questions regarding assumptions I’d previously made in the plotting/characterization (assumptions that resulted in gaps/unclarity): Why assume that XX is a salesman? Why one career and not another? Do the two daughters actually fight? If they don’t, why not, considering the tension between them? If they do, when would it break out in the story? Which secondary character should I axe, D or T, considering the story is unwieldy with both their stories? I’ve been through many drafts, and this point a different kind of thinking is needed than the kind produced by generating pages.
I went to a writing retreat last month and considered it huge progress that I answered so many questions. I must have written about 800 words (on characterization charts) the whole week. Maybe there’s a way of adapting the log to this type of work…? Because yeah, I admit it’s very easy to get sidetracked…
Excellent points, Helen, and I totally understand this. A qualitative analysis is very different from a quantitative tally, and can’t be logged the same way, if at all. Although I can see keeping track of these kinds of things in journal-like entries: “Today I got clearer on the relationship dynamics between these two characters, and tweaked this particular story arc, and here’s how I feel about that…”
Even though I think on paper a lot, this is something I’d never actually thought of before, and I like it a lot, so many thanks for putting the idea out there.
Great idea, I’m going to try the Log of Ideas. Sounds almost Harry Potter-ish.