Challenge Your Friends

Last week we talked about how to give yourself points for writing and writing-related activities, track them on a spreadsheet, and evaluate your progress. This week I thought I’d show you how I tracked progress for a writing challenge I did with my friends.

Again, I’m a huge Excel fan, so I put everything into a spreadsheet. Here is a picture:

(Sorry these pictures are blurry!) The first column is our names, next is our goal (500 words per day, synopsis and 3 chapters, etc.), then our goal as a number value for the month (15,500 for the 500 a day, 4 for the synopsis and chapters, etc.), then our completed work as a percentage of goal, and finally our total-to-date number value. The next columns are the daily counts for each person, 28-31 columns depending on the month. (The total-to-date column adds these 31 columns to get its total.)

Every day or few days, people would email to say what they’d gotten accomplished. Once a week or so I’d post the spreadsheet for everyone to see. Numbers are great, but I really like visual pictures as well. So I made a chart of our progress and posted that for everyone to see as well.

It was fun for all of us to participate together, and really fun to see our progress bars rise during the month. Of course, it’s not fun to see yourself at 0% or 4%, both of which have been issues for me in the past. But the whole point of working together is to try to find ways to encourage each other. In the example above, Marcy exceeded her goal for the first time and we all sent her lots of kudos by email! Other times someone else does really well, or someone will do poorly and feel bad about it so we all cheer them on even more.

Do you have a group you can have writing challenges with? If someone in your group enjoys this kind of “techy” work, you can have a chart posted somewhere so you can all see each other’s progress. (We use Yahoo Groups and post to the Files area.) If not, you can all keep track of your own progress and just email each other during the month.

Try it! The commaraderie and encouragement can be a real boost to your motivation!