I’ve been tracking my writing time since the beginning of the year. It’s interesting to see the data and the averages over time that go with it. As of today, I’ve written just over 70,000 words and spent 165 hours doing it.

My time tracking spreadsheet says that I’ve spent an average of 1h 54m per day writing. Looking at the data, one thing stands out. I’ve only been measuring my “first draft” writing time. Revisions, editing, and story planning aren’t being counted.

If I’m going to track something like this it should be accurate. Until now it hasn’t been. I’ve known this for a while, and I was getting lax with tracking any time at all.

I found the answer in a writing podcast. The host, Mur Lafferty, also keeps a spreadsheet, and was giving herself word count credit for editing time. Her rule of thumb is each hour of editing is worth 400 words. That sounds about right to me. So after thinking about it, I’m going to do the same.

If I’m going sit at the computer writing and doing its related activities I want my “timesheet” to reflect that. But I also know a lot of editing time for things like blog posts don’t take an hour. So I came up with a formula that calculates the WPH equivalent value for the time I record. Doing this by hand would be tedious. That’s the reason I’m using a spreadsheet. So it can do the math based on my input.

This is how I picked my time to WPH equivalents.

I changed my calculation cell to factor these in when I enter my times. The end goal is to make my weekly summaries accurately reflect the time I spend on writing projects.

I also played with using one of the various time tracking apps. It was worth exploring, but the benefit/hassle ratio broke the wrong way. Using an app doesn’t make sense when the spreadsheet is just an alt-tab away. I want to keep my writing machine running smoothly with the fewest moving parts necessary.