We are now one week into NaNoWriMo, but even writers who aren’t participating in a writing marathon need to track their progress. For both sets, here are a couple of tools which offer wordcount progress tracking with some customisation features to fit into your own writing time plans.
WriteTrack by Davids Gale (Web)
WriteTrack is a webapp that allows you to setup challenges as campaigns, input the target wordcount, and gives you a calendar mapping out each day’s wordcount to get you to that target. But each day can be weighted according to your schedule.
As an example I setup NaNoWriMo – at 55K, this maps out to the 1647 words per day that you would expect. But like many other writers, I have solid commitments on some days which make writing difficult. So, I took out all of the Saturdays from the schedule (aside from the first Saturday of the month, which happens to be the first day of the challenge). WriteTrack recalculated my daily wordcount requirements which handily meets exactly 2000 per day.
It’s free to register and setup WriteTrack. Link: WriteTrack
WriteChain (iOS)
WriteChain is a simple app for the iPhone, and it’s free. The app lets you set a word count target per day, and chains your progress together in links.
But you are allowed to set a small amount of “coasting” days – ie my Saturdays, where you can not meet that wordcount target and the app will allow the chain to carry on.
Free to download onto iphones. Link: WriteChain
Other Mobile Apps
- Write-O-Meter is a very nice Android app, and includes a progress report and integrated timer.
- NaNoProgress is a free app for Android.
- Word Tracker for iOS keeps track of time spent, wordcount and your thoughts.
- Word Count Dashboard for iOS looks like a corkboard, with goal and time trackers and reports.
- Word count widgets and these apps can be found on my Listly list.
#52Tech: This was Week 45 post in the #52tech goal – to investigate and share one technology post once a week for 2014. You can find all the posts indexed via the #52tech tag, or top menu option at hunterswritings.com
