Measuring writing effort
Taking action on my STELLAR workshop learnings and looking for a 'shoestring' tool to help me measure and monitor my writing efforts
My objective
In my last agile Teams post, I described my takeaways from the STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas workshop I joined this week, and gave myself an action to include an effort Limit in my writing plan. Doing this requires me to figure out how to measure and monitor my actual writing effort (time) vs. my planned range of hours per week.
Looking for a support tool
While I was a PSP developer (Personal Software Process, not Play Station 😏) and TSP coach, I enjoyed having a simple tool to help me efficiently log my actual time on various software development and coaching tasks. It still took effort and focus to do the logging, though. Finding new ways to automate collection of good-enough task data was actually the planned focus of my partial PhD work in the mid-2000’s with Dr. Laurie Williams!
Naturally, I’d love to find a super simple tool to help me measure and monitor how much time per day/week I spend on writing and working towards my publishing goals. I’d prefer a tool that is free / open source; this initial startup period of my writing initiative is very much running on a ‘shoestring’.
Some options
Here’s what I’ve found so far:
There doesn’t seem to be e.g. an officially supported Chrome plugin for tracking the elapsed time spent editing a Google Doc.
Timing app looks on point, but is Mac only, and costs $9-11/month - not an option for me.
This Quora post says that Google’s Activity Dashboard shows total editing time. That would work if I use one doc per publishable post, which I could do. However, checking one of my existing Google Docs, I don’t see that editing time data in the Activity log.
The free plan of the Tracking Time browser plugin might work
Clockify promises that it’s “free forever” and might also fill the need
My next steps: Look more into the Google dashboard Quora mentioned, and digest the privacy terms of Tracking Time and Clockify before I give them a whirl. (I’ll post an update once I have analyzed and tried them.)
Curious if any of you
have any tools you use & can recommend for tracking writing effort? Kindly comment below or restack with a Note - thanks!Hey, thanks for reading about my new writing adventures and supporting my work! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and participate in the community features:
Not sure if this helps you, but when I write I use 25min Pomodoro time boxes, and then see how much was done in that time box - to then gauge how many more sets I need to do.