Writing Analytics
Every writing-productivity app eventually gets around to telling you the same thing: write every day, hit your word count, build your streak, watch the numbers go up. It’s good advice — consistent writing practice really does matter more than inspiration, and the authors who finish books mostly finish them by showing up — but the usual implementation has a problem. Tracking the habit becomes another thing competing for your attention. You open a separate app to log your session. You remember halfway through to start the timer. You forget to stop it when you walk away. After a week the data is wrong or missing and the whole system becomes one more thing to feel bad about.
Writing Analytics is meant to stay out of the way. Sessions start automatically when you open a document. They end when you close it or walk away. Word counts, durations, and pace get recorded in the background. Goals and streaks update themselves. You never have to think about it until you want to look at the numbers — and when you do, they’re all there, honest, local, and nobody else’s business.
Create goals with a target word count and a time horizon. Four types:
- Daily — a target for a single day.
- Weekly — a target over seven days.
- Monthly — a target over thirty days.
- Project — a long-term target over a configurable period, defaulting to ninety days. Good for NaNoWriMo-style pushes or finishing a draft by a specific date.
Every goal tracks target words, current words, percentage complete, remaining words, days remaining, and an on-track flag. You’re considered on-track if your daily output meets at least 80% of the rate you’d need to finish on time. The 80% threshold is deliberate — it means one slow day doesn’t flip you to “behind” the moment you fall short of the exact daily rate, but a week of slow days will.
Automatic session tracking
Section titled “Automatic session tracking”A session starts the moment you open a document in the editor, assuming analytics is enabled in Settings. The session records:
- Which document you were writing in.
- Word count at start and end.
- Start and end timestamps.
- Words written (the delta) and total duration in minutes.
The session ends when you close the document, navigate away, or manually end it. On close, daily progress, every active goal, and your current streak update in one pass. No buttons to remember. No timers to start. You write, the numbers take care of themselves.
The edge case worth knowing about — if you open a document to read rather than write, the session still starts. Duration gets recorded but words written is zero, so your pace stats aren’t polluted. If you want analytics to stop touching read-only sessions entirely, toggle it off in Settings before opening the document.
Streaks
Section titled “Streaks”The streak tracks consecutive days of writing with at least fifty words. Four values:
- Current streak — how many days in a row you’ve written.
- Longest streak — your personal best, held across the whole project history.
- Last writing date — the last day that got streak credit.
- Streak start date — when your current run began.
Writing more on the same day doesn’t double-count — streaks are per-day, not per-session. Missing a full day resets the current streak to zero but leaves the longest-ever intact. The longest streak is the number authors actually remember; the current streak is the one that keeps you honest.
Daily progress
Section titled “Daily progress”Per-day aggregation of everything you did that day — total words written, total minutes at the keyboard, number of sessions, your daily goal target (if you had one), and whether you hit it. This is what the weekly summary charts are built from, and it’s the data you scroll through when you want to see the shape of the last month.
Weekly progress summary
Section titled “Weekly progress summary”One screen showing where you stand. Includes:
- Every active goal with current percentage and remaining words.
- Current streak and longest-ever streak.
- Weekly totals — words written, minutes at the keyboard, days active out of seven, average words per day.
- The last seven days broken out individually — date, words, goal target, whether you hit it.
It’s the view to open on Sunday morning when you want to know whether last week was real or whether you’re telling yourself a story.
Productivity insights
Section titled “Productivity insights”Based on your last thirty days of completed sessions, the insights panel calculates:
- Total sessions and total words.
- Average words per session.
- Average session duration.
- Words per minute.
- Personalized recommendations based on your patterns.
The recommendations are deliberately specific:
- Under 200 words per session — suggests scaling goals down to something achievable. The fastest way to kill a writing habit is to set a target you miss every day.
- Sessions under 15 minutes — suggests longer sessions to get into flow. Most writers don’t hit flow in the first ten minutes; if your sessions are ending before you get there, you’re leaving the best writing on the table.
- Sessions over 120 minutes without breaks — suggests taking breaks. Two straight hours is the point where fatigue catches up and quality drops.
- Below ten words per minute — suggests freewriting exercises. Pace under 10 wpm usually means the draft is fighting you; freewriting is the cheapest way to get unstuck.
- On-track and consistent — positive reinforcement. If the system sees a pattern working, it tells you so instead of nagging.
Insights don’t replace a writing coach. They’re pattern recognition on your own data, pointed at the obvious problems so you catch them before a bad week becomes a bad month.
Settings
Section titled “Settings”Analytics can be toggled on or off in Settings → General, under “Track writing sessions & goals.” When disabled, sessions don’t start, no data is collected, and nothing about your writing patterns is recorded anywhere. Useful if you’re writing in a context you don’t want tracked — test documents, quick notes, or a genre you’re not sure you’re serious about yet.