Rewards are powerful, but they can also be simple, almost insubstantial. Putting a check mark on a list is a reward that can provide real motivation. Making progress public is also effective. For example, the Goodreads Reading Challenge motivates me to read more books during the year and to push to reach my goal by the end of the year. In fact, I have to be careful not to set the goal too high, otherwise I spend too much time reading, taking me away from other more productive activities, like writing.
That brings me to this effort to publicly track my writing progress on this blog. The novel tracker shows the total words and the word count I want to reach by the end of the year: 65,000 so far and 80,000 by the end of the year. The general writing tracker shows my progress towards an end of the year goal for general writing, including the novel.
It will be interesting to see how tracking my progress on this blog impacts the quantity of my writing of my writing output. The goals I have set are very modest, but will require me to significantly increase the consistency of my writing. Here goes. It should be fun.
Oh, and the title of this blog is also the working title of my novel or WIP. So, time to follow the dragon and get to work!
