Weekly/monthly word count goals?

Scrivener Wish List
1

Adding this b/c I’ve seen similar-but-not-the-same requests. I love the session word count goal feature in Scrivener (Windows). But being a parent with a full-time day job makes my writing time sporadic, so while the per-session word count is still a great feature, my sessions vary by length and frequency. I organize my writing goals based on monthly word count targets that I then break down into per-week targets. It would be cool to have more customization in the Widget so I could get notified of “Yay, you reached your weekly word count goal!” and “Nice work, you hit your monthly word count target!”

2

There are two things I can think of that might work for you:

  • Click the Options button in the Project Targets window, and select the Session Target tab. At the top, change the Reset session count setting to “Never”. Click OK, and now make note of the Reset button in here. You can click that whenever you want, over days or months as you please, and set a goal that makes sense for that interval.

  • The other approach is one you might have noticed while looking at the various settings. Back in Options, in the Draft Target tab, you can enable the Deadline feature, and set something reasonable here. Now over in the Session Target tab, enable Automatically calculate from draft deadline. You can set which days to write, or leave it alone to have all days considered writing days.

    Now that will still break things down by day, you’ll notice when you save the settings, but the actual amount that is allocated will change on a daily basis, depending on your progress.

Personally I would prefer the latter as it gives you a sense of where you’re at. Working up to a goal that is a month off could mean an intimidating number to work against, but by breaking that down to a suggestion of how much to write today to meet that goal eventually, it’s a bit more rewarding I think.

3

But the only point I would add is you should be setting your monthly draft target as well. For example if you have written 10,000 words so far and want to write 4 thousand in a month, Then when you set the deadline for a month for now you must make the project “target” 14,000 for this method to reflect the goal of 4000 words for the month. Then every month you change your “deadline” and add your monthly hoped for production to your current word total to set the new “draft” target.

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