You Become What You Measure

It's not an original observation, but in my experience, you become what you measure. (Five minutes Googling around leads me to believe I got this from Peter Drucker, who wrote, "What gets measured gets managed"). The concept was driven home to me in my video game days, where necessary obsession over user retention, engagement, and monetization drove, for better or worse, the most critical aspects of a game's design. We paid attention to art and fun and narrative too, of course (without those things, you don't have a game), but they weren't the things we measured, and they became secondary to the things we tracked.

I've written before about the metrics I apply to my work as a writer. At first, I logged sessions. Then I tracked the hours spent in those sessions. These things were both in my wheelhouse from managing game design teams -- I wanted to know what my people were doing, and how long it took them to do it. But after a couple years at this writing thing, I've found measuring hours by themselves inadequate and maybe damaging.

In part this is because tracking time measures input, but doesn't measure output. I figured this was all right, because my output is my published stories and these blog articles. But what time doesn't capture is the velocity of output, except in the grossest “projects divided by hours” sense. And hours are primarily useful for measuring completed work, providing only a rough guideline for work-in-progress.

Because of this I've started tracking session word count in addition to time.

Here's where writers give me a diploma from the Flat Forehead School (slap your forehead to get the joke), because writers have been measuring their output by work count since the chisels-and-tablets days. I get it. But the reason I haven't tracked by word count is the same reason I don't measure my morning runs by distance.

I don't want to get discouraged.

When I started running (and I have "started" many times, with scant success), rather than setting out to run a mile, I concentrated on running for three minutes. Then walking. Then running for another minute. Then walking, etc. This is the backbone of the "Couch to 5K" programs intended to get sedentary folks (like writers!) off their butts and onto the road. The goal is build endurance and habits without getting discouraged by your 5K time.

(The discouragment comes later, when you show up for your race).

Measuring my work by time, rather than word count, adhered to the same spirit. But now that I've shown up to the race -- having completed and sold several stories -- I find I'm discouraged by my output. This is because I've only been measuring time, and I've become what I measure: a guy who spends time writing.

With a clock running in the background, I can hit the two or three hour mark and then close my laptop, confident that I put in my work for the day. And I did! But I might have gotten only two or three hundred words from those two hours, maybe less. You can do the math to figure how that pace measures against 5000 words for a short story, or 80,000 words for a novel. Measuring only by time, you will success yourself to death trying to reach those targets.

Of course, I have always paid attention to word count. Short stories have specific word count requirements (particularly for flash fiction), and when I was re-writing Gumshoe Frankenstein, I tracked daily word count on a burn-down chart against my target date of completion. But in those cases, measuring words was just another way of measuring time -- how long was it taking me to get to a goal?

What I needed was for the word count to be a goal in and of itself.

This last week I wrote a short story -- "Law of the Jungle." I don't know if it's any good or if it will ever be published, but the first draft is done at 6700 words and it is ready to be edited down to something readable. Groovy. It's taken me a bit better than thirteen hours over seven sessions so far. Fine. BUT I'd still be working on the first draft if I didn't also hold myself to the goal of writing 1000 words a day. (Don't laugh, that's a lot for me, given that I revise-as-I-go). Instead I'd mark 60 or 120 or 150 minutes in my log and come back for more the next day.

Now I write down my minutes, but I also do a word count ... and if I'm on 700 for that session, that's a kick in the rear to get to 1000.

By measuring time, I developed a daily work ethic and trained myself to sit with my work in a state of high concentration for hours at a time. By adding word count, I hope to improve my pace and get more things written in the time I'm putting in. I am acutely aware that Gumshoe Frankenstein took me two years of more-or-less full-time effort to complete at 68K words (and because of the re-write, 100K may be more accurate, but the final product is 68K). I am also aware that if I can write 1000 words a day I will get to an 80K word first draft of a novel in three or four months, even taking weekends off.

I am ACUTELY aware of this.

So let's see how it goes. (And I know that stating your plans is a way to hear God laugh).