For the past 2.5 years, from January 2022 onward, I challenged myself to write daily. The goal at the time was to do it for one year, a minimum of 500 words a day, and writing about whatever, whenever, and with whichever medium, though it ended up all mostly being short fiction. In that year, about one-half of the writings I did digitally and the other half were done sporadically on notebooks or in note apps on my phone.

It turns out I just could not kick the habit. 2023 continued, but was less rigorous and 2024 even more so. Now I write in spurts of about five days and then sometimes leave writing for a week. It is part of my hesitation: why am I writing, what for? Perhaps, then, to help answer these questions, I could reflect on what has been written, take measure of my pase, and see if there are any surprises. Here is a plot:

It is interactive, so you can hover over the points to see what was written on the day. The blue horizontal line represents the number of words written on average per day. The red horizontal line is the same average, but with the days removed where I did not write.

I am pleasantly surprised! My daily minimum is 500 words, and I assumed that I hardly break the 1K word threshold per day. But, it seems that my average is well above that when I do write (it is about 1.3k). This means that the days of heavy writing significantly outweigh the drier days. When I start writing it is hard to stop (and the data shows it).

Let’s see where we are in another couple years!