Mid-year Review, 2021: Not as bad as I feared, but not progress

So, I’m a bit overdue for an update on how I’ve been doing production-wise for the first part of this year. I have typically finished up a first part of the year review by the beginning of June, but I had to settle for the end of July this time. Oh, well.

If you did not know, I have been keeping track of the productivity of my writing for the past several years – since about 2013. I settled on the format that I currently use for tracking my productivity by 2018. As a result, I now have 3 1/2 years of data to compare with and see how I have been improving (or not) over that time.

What I have to report, essentially, is that I unfortunately did not have as good of a first part of the year as I did last year, which is the best of the four years I have to judge. However, despite my decline, especially in June, it is still the second best first part of the year I have recorded since I began this.

Just to go over the rules I have set myself:

I meet my daily goal if I write at least 500 words per day or plan/revise my work for at least 30 minutes a day. That would be an average of 3,500 words per week (or the equivalent time in planning/revisions, or some combination of the two.
The numbers I will show will include the total words written, the total number of minutes I spent revising/planning, and the percentage of times that I met my daily writing goals (DWGM). I’ll also give the monthly averages for words and minutes, and the DWGM average for the first part of the year as well.

And now, here are the writing statistics for the first part of 2021:

• Jan:
  • Words: 10,764
  • Revise/Plan: 750 min.
  • DWGM: 67 percent
• Feb:
  • Words: 17,042
  • Revise/Plan: 450 min.
  • DWGM: 68 percent
• Mar:
  • Words: 19,396
  • Revise/Plan: 0 min.
  • DWGM: 66 percent
• Apr:
  • Words: 12,728
  • Revise/Plan: 30 min.
  • DWGM: 54 percent
• May:
  • Words:  16,931
  • Revise/Plan: 0 min.
  • DWGM: 57 percent
• Jun:
  • Words: 9,991 words
  • Revise/Plan: 60 min.
  • DWGM: 29 percent
• 1st half of 2021:
  • Words (total): 86,852
  • Words (avg.) 14,475
  • Revise/Plan (total): 1290
  • Revise/Plan (avg.) 215
  • DWGM (avg.): 57 percent

As you can see, there was a bit of a fall-off in June, and there might be a similar fall-off this month, but we’ll have to see.

Now, I will show the comparisons with previous years:

• 1st half of 2018:
  • Words (total): 31,683
  • Words (avg.): 5,281
  • Revisions (total): 3,965
  • Revisions (avg.): 661
  • DWGM (avg.): 43%
    
• 1st half of 2019:
  • Words (total): 76,038
  • Words (avg.): 12,673
  • Revise/Plan (total): 3,495
  • Revise/Plan (avg.) 583
  • DWGM (avg.): 67%
• 1st half of 2020:
  • Words (total): 114,459
  • Words (avg.)  19,077
  • Revise/Plan (total): 2,340
  • Revise/Plan (avg.) 390
  • DWGM (avg.): 66%
• 1st half of 2021:
  • Words (total): 86,852
  • Words (avg.) 14,475
  • Revise/Plan (total): 1290
  • Revise/Plan (avg.) 215
  • DWGM (avg.): 57 percent

I’ve secretly suspected that my tendency is to slack off during times I am on vacation, which frustrates me because I think that I should use that time well if I have it free. Maybe I find it too intimidating? Maybe I just procrastinate. Well, I’m trying to fight that procrastination over the past few days and have been doing well to get some writing done on this blog.

And it turns out that I blew past my four-year anniversary. I’ll talk about that and some other stuff this weekend, too. Thanks for checking in with me, and all of you writers keep writing.