Day 658: Not recording words per hour writing speed

My editing and writing time was a bit longer today because in the middle of each I had to do house chores (laundry and cooking) and I didn’t bother stopping my Toggl timer. But then it hit me that I feel very freed in not recording my words per hour writing speed.

Part of my problem was that I was conscious of the fact that my writing time and speed was being recorded. Knowing my writing speed made me want to write as fast as possible. So I would feel the urgency to write quickly during that time, even when I was trying not to vomit write but to write more mindfully. It made my writing sessions a little stressful because I was aware I was measuring my writing speed, which made me conscious of how fast I was typing and every time I had to stop to think.

But what also made it stressful to record my words per hours writing speed was that if I was slower one day over another, I felt disappointment in myself. I would then think about how to write faster.

But I know by now that writing faster doesn’t necessarily match my personality. I would usually try to write faster by writing messy and not taking the time to correct my mistakes, but that made my self-editing much more difficult. After I read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, I also started working on learning to focus more, so there are now fewer minutes when I'm just staring at the screen, but that’s a matter of practice and some days I do it better than others.

In my case, I think ignorance really is bliss. Since I don’t know my day to day writing speed, I don’t worry about it. I don’t write messy to try to compensate for a slower words per hour rate, and instead I’ve been trying to work on learning to focus more intently instead.

I still know that some days I’m writing a lot slower than others, and in general I’m pretty sure that I’m writing at a slower pace than I did when I was tracking my writing speed. But I find it much less stressful, also, and I think the lack of stress has made me enjoy the writing process a bit more than I did before.

I’m still recording how long each process of the book takes me—I use Toggl to record how long I spend editing, writing, and outlining or blocking, and at the end of the book I’ll compile the statistics and compare with how long it took me to write the other books in the series. (Book 4 will take me longer than books 2 and 3 because of my overall slower writing speed and also because I stopped writing for a while when I was sick, and when I got back to it, I had to spend several hours extra hours looking over and revisiting the blocking.)

I’ll be able to calculate words per hour speed at that point, but I think it’s more useful to look at how long it took me overall to write each book or to do each step of the process for each book (outlining, writing, editing).

It will help me to be able to guesstimate how long it will take to write other books, but I won’t use it to try to write faster. I already experimented and know that writing faster doesn’t help me write better, plus I don’t like the slight stress associated with writing faster.

Honestly, I would love to increase my writing speed—and a strong part of my personality craves that kind of self-improvement. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that it’s been taking me so long to write 800 words for the past several days.

But I realized that writing at my own pace makes the writing more enjoyable. I also knew that writing at this slower pace will make the self-editing easier and less stressful, and since I hate self-editing so much, anything that lightens that load is a win for me.

Plus in practicing my deep focus, I will hopefully increase my writing speed naturally since I won’t spend as much time just staring and not writing. So I guess I’ve turned my attention more toward learning deep focus instead, rather than improving writing speed. The skill of deep focus will help improve my productivity more than practicing throwing words down on the page as fast as possible.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 3 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 31 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 836 words

Writing streak: 137 days

Blocking: time spent: 49 minutes

Blocking streak: 131 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 23 minutes

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 10 minutes

My takeaway for today: Not recording writing words per hour is lower stress, matches my personality more, and helps me write at better book.