In relative terms, I actually did worse on two of the metrics that applied both years. 213 pages out of 286 is only 74.6%, compared to the previous year's 191 out of 250, which is 76.4%. Similarly, 16,060 words is a smaller percentage of 22,096 than 14,722 is of 20,000, 72.7% compared to 73.6%. Only in my reading goal did I manage relative improvement as well as absolute. 87 books out of 111, 78.4%, compared to the previous year's 73/100. These first two are not a huge surprise, as the goals for the past year were set deliberately high - I can less readily account for how well I did with the reading, although some part of it might be attributable to having a couch to sit on, readier access to my book boxes, and half as many talkative housemates.
I didn't end up with as much useful information about time spent as I would have liked, since the 10 and a half months during which I did not have a device capable of running my time tracking app overlapped with both years. While I will not commit such incomplete data to paper, I will say that the amount by which I fell short of my writing time goal in 2020-2021, compared with the amounts by which I fell short of my word count, page count, and blog goals is not adequately accounted for by a single month's missed time tracking. My writing goals, and in particular my fiction writing goal, were set far too low for the good of either my creative development or my professional aspirations. It is for this reason that, in defiance of any reasonable expectations that the previous two years' evidence might support, I am setting my 2021-2022 fiction writing goal to 50,000 words.
Having once established that I am not writing enough, this may come as something of a surprise, but I am also lowering my blog post goal, from 75 to 60. Please don't worry. If I get anywhere near reaching that goal, you'll still get at least as many posts as you did this past year. The fact is that the need to produce blog posts was routinely a sticking point in my task rotation, owing partly to their being so many steps involved, and partly to the fact that everything except the Dresden Files reread is like, hard. One of my non-quantifiable goals for this year is to figure out the combination of lowered barriers and particularized goal-setting which will allow me to consistently produce advice columns, craft posts, book reviews, and Wheel of Time reread posts, without exhausting myself or losing days of productivity struggling with a single post. At any rate the draft by hand, then it up on the laptop routine will necessarily be disrupted a little, because I don't currently have a working laptop. We're looking at some combination of typing things up on a library computer, and typing things up on my phone and using the library to format and add photos.
My 2020-2021 goals for pages written, words written, and books read were set at 150% of what I accomplished in 2019-2020. For this year, for the two goals that are entering their third year, and that I did not just abruptly and drastically increase, I averaged the previous two years' results and multiplied that by 125%, producing goals lower than last year's, but higher than I have so far actually managed to accomplish. This may still be too high, I don't know. Next year, I shall be able to play around with rates of increase, and then we'll see what's what. (I am well aware that my annual goals can't just keep going up forever, perpetual growth is a capitalist myth, but I have good reason to believe that I could be accomplishing considerably more than I am, and I don't know where the limit on that actually is. This is partly my way of feeling it out). The goal for pages read us once again based on the goal for books read, although using a more realistic 375 pages per book, rather than last year's 350.
So now I think it's time to talk about the profusion of additional progress bars over there on your right. I've added a shitton of new goals. A few are to better capture additional angles of work I was already tracking, like fanfic chapters and words of nonfiction. I was already writing fan fiction, and counting it towards my fiction word count, but I hope that this additional metric will better allow me both to maintain regular updates and to balance it with my original fiction. Similarly, I was already writing nonfiction, in the form of blog posts and freelance assignments, which were tracked to some extent by blog posts and handwritten pages, but I hope by tracking the actual number of nonfiction words to get a better sense of how much of my writing-specific time and energy these activities consume, and to assess whether there's any validity to my anxiety that my blog posts are too short. The goal of 15,000 words is somewhat arbitrary - this is more about seeing where I end up than getting anywhere in particular, but it provides a decent basis for comparison.
My reading time goal has been reduced from 1200 hours to 1000, because I asked around and most of the working writers I know are reading and writing at about a 1:1 ratio, not a 6:5 ratio.
All but one of the other goals are related to things I was already doing, want to do more of, and feel are worthwhile, but that I didn't feel like I could justify spending the time when they didn't contribute anything to the damn spreadsheet. These can be divided into three categories: tabletop roleplaying games, video games, and non-book media consumption.
My partner is a tabletop game game designer, and I'm… not, but I like tabletop gaming, and spending most of ones free waking hours with someone who does them professionally makes that more salient than it otherwise might be. There's also a tabletop RPG system I've been wanting to write for like, a decade now. And I finally last year found a system that should allow me to run a campaign based on my Actual Favorite Book Series, so I'm trying to get that set up. And there's another, much more involved campaign that I've been trying to get fully prepped for years now. I have five metrics for this one: words written (on my own system, or campaign and setting notes or homebrew for either of the campaigns), hours spent (counting all time spent playing or developing, and half the time spent reading), pages read (of game manuals or similar), elements designed, and macroelements/subsystems designed. An element would be like, one feat in D&D, or one dot of a Contract in Changeling the Lost, while a macroelement might be the whole Contract, or a feat tree, but might also be like, all the combat rules. Finalizing all the feats or spells in the game would also constitute a macroelement, even if it contained feat trees that had already been counted. Having a separate count for pages of game manuals read is the big thing I'm adding to try and make the time it takes to actually cover-to-cover a game manual worthwhile. Pages of game manuals read also count towards pages read, and the books themselves will be included in the general count.
"Video games" here mostly means my efforts to catch up on the Pokemon games (I got through most of Moon when it came out, but otherwise haven't completed a Pokemon game since Platinum), finishing Breath of the Wild, and completing my attempt at a 100% run of Majora's Mask. If I am able to obtain a Switch, PS4, or PS5 this year, my horizons on this front will broaden considerably. I have only two metrics here: time, which should be self-explanatory, and orbs, which is a shorthand for small-but-significant units of progress as appropriate to the game. Catching a Pokemon is an orb (in the regular games, not in Let's Go), and so is beating a gym leader. Beating a shrine in Breath of the Wild, getting a mask in Majora's Mask, or beating a dungeon in any Zelda game would all count. Beating an Elite Four member for the first time, or on a rematch when their team has changed, would count, but if I white out and have to start over, re-beating the ones I already got past would not. In Jak and Daxter, power cells would count, but precursor orbs, despite the name, would not, because they are too numerous and often obtained more than one at a time. Mobile games do not count for time or orbs.
In the past two years, I've had a hard time keeping up with my RSS feed, much less catching up on and incorporating new blogs and YouTube channels. Part of that is just, y'know, have you seen the past two years? But part of it is that incentive thing again. Reading blog posts counts towards my reading time, but that's it. YouTube doesn't count at all, so from the perspective of my metric-obsessed little brain, it's wasted time. And the same for movies and TV shows, both of which are kind of important for my mental health and creative process.
The last goal here is walking, which is measured in kilometers because I'm using Pokemon Go to track it. This is kinda like the nonfiction word count. I walk a lot, like several hours every day except during the very hottest and coldest parts of the year, and I do a lot of hard-to-track word, like planning and talking out my ideas, while walking, so distance walked is functioning as a sort of proxy for time spent doing the parts of my work that don't otherwise produce a measurable result.
So here is the full list of my goals for the coming year:
Books Read - 105 (includes non-rereads over 12.5k in any medium)
Pages Read - 39,375 (includes audiobooks, does not include rereads)
Rereads - 80
Reading Time - 1000 Hours
Handwritten Pages - 253
Words of Fiction - 50,000
Words of Nonfiction - 15,000
Fanfiction Chapters - 25
Blog Posts - 60
Writing Time - 1000 Hours
Tabletop Game Subsystems - 20
Tabletop Game Elements - 200
Tabletop Game Words Written - 8000
Tabletop Game Pages Read - 2000
Tabletop Game Time - 300 Hours
Orbs - 300
Video Game Time - 200 Hours
Blog Posts Read - 365
YouTube Videos Watched - 365
TV Episodes Watched - 200 (does not include rewatching)
Movies Watched - 24
Walking - 2500 km
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