I should do a new one for March, maybe. I could steal Rish's idea from last year and call it March Madness. He made that one up himself, though, so maybe I shouldn't steal it.
Anyway, it's time for a progress-so-far post, complete with spreadsheets and the whole shebang.
Despite suffering through a lot of self-doubt, worry about the worth of all the work I was doing, and attempts to just give up and let it all go, I managed to achieve both of my goals for February.
Goal number one was to reach 30,000 words on the month. I beat that one by a few thousand words. Finishing up at 33,603 words for the month.
My second, and more important goal was to write every single day for the entire month. I started this whole process back on the 28th of October, and had been yet to manage to write every day for any of the months previous to February. Not even October, during which I only counted four of the days. I still only wrote for three days. The closest I came was last month, in January. I only missed two days that month, one of them being the first day of the month, sabotaging my effort right out of the gate.
This month, however, I wrote every day. All twenty-nine days. As Cartman would say:
Is Cartman still a thing? I feel old including a reference to South Park. Might as well quote The Simpsons, right? Or The Andy Griffith Show. Anyway...what was I saying?
Oh yeah. Managed to achieve my two goals that I set out with at the start of the month. Here's my final chart for the month of February:
Now we should zoom out and look at the even bigger picture. How are things going for the yearly goal? I'm supposed to make it to 300,000 words by the time my birthday arrives in October of 2020. How are things coming on that front? Here's the year-to-date chart:
Hmm...with that many months, the chart is becoming too small to read. I think you can zoom in on it if you click on the picture, if you want to examine all the totals for the whole year. I'll probably break it up into two parts next month so that it will fit better.
So, I'm at 92,680 words so far. Let's take a look at how that total fits in a progress meter.
92680 / 300000 (30.89%)
I am 30% of the way there. That's pretty awesome. I have eight months left to go before my time runs out. If I can manage to keep up the pace that I've kept in January and February of 30,000 words a month, then...doing the math...I can add 240,000 more words onto that 92,680. Which would put me at 332,680 words at the end of the year. That's well above my goal, so things are definitely looking up. Definitely on the positive side.
My guess is that some curve balls will be thrown my way before this year is out. Something will sorely test my resolve, and I will have to push my way through. So, I'm glad that I am on pace to have 32,000 extra words. I may need some of them to help me on bad months. Who knows?
Also, I'm going to try to keep up the trend of outdoing the last month's total. So far, every month has been a higher total than the last. So, my goal for this upcoming month will not just be 30,000 words. Instead it will be 33,604. I should be able to manage it, because March has 31 days whereas February only had 29. No sweat, right?
I'm going to stick with the 1,000 words a day goal. Not upping that further this month. There were too many days in February that I struggled to make it to 1,000. So, I'm just going to stick with that until I can do it in my sleep.
I think my new goal this month will be to see if I can't get my words written each day before I go to work, though. All month long, I've been staying up past midnight, often past 1:00 AM, or even many times past 2:00 AM. Hell, I think there was a time or two that I was still up past 3:00 AM. My body is not appreciating that treatment. I want to see if I can relieve the stress of being unable to go to bed without finishing my words, by having them done by noon much less midnight. Then, I might be able to just add to them during my lunch break as well, and have some gaudy number totals like Rish got over and over in February. Or I can use my lunch break to work on other things that I've fallen behind on. Whatever works. I just gotta take better care of myself.
What I do know, is that I'm on my way to my mountain. It's been waiting a long time, after all.
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