I was asked about how I track my word count in my bullet journal, and it’s easier to answer here. (If you click on a photo, you can see a larger version…theoretically.)

I did up June’s page to be the example. Down the left are the days of the week and the date. Across the top are Title, Start, Days (until deadline), Goal, End, Total, and a little box to draw a star or a happy face if I meet the goal.

I wrote in an example, and even remembered to switch to pencil so I can erase it, LOL. Yay me! Let’s say I’m writing an 80,000 word book. I’m starting June with 8735 already written. I have 26 business (writing) days until my deadline, so I need to write 2741 words today to stay on track. (Ideally, more so that goal number is lower the next day.) Then I put in the end word count. When I stuck random numbers in, I accidentally blew it. My start word count was 8735 and my end count was 11,346, so I have 2611 for the day. (No happy face for me.) So the next day my goal would be slightly higher.

This year, I’m not working weekends, so I highlight the Saturdays and Sundays to block them out, as well as the goal blocks. I leave the weekends on the page, however, because sometimes I still write on the weekends. But I don’t have to. You can see that Thursday the 30th is also pink. That’s the day before we leave for our long vacation at camp, which means a lot of running around and shopping and packing. Though I’ll probably still write some words, when I was calculating my deadline I recognized that there’s a good chance I won’t and I factored that in ahead of time rather than set myself up for falling a day behind.

In my weekly layout, I also highlight a block between my top 3 tasks for the day and my hourly breakdown. I write my goal for the day there so it’s in my face, so to speak. But the rest of the word count tracking is on the June Words page.

There’s some redundancy in listing the title each day. And obviously the end word count for one day is the starting word count for the following day. But it’s part of my process to write it all out in the morning, just to help me focus on what needs doing.

There are as many ways to track word count in a bullet journal as there are writing bullet journalists, but this way works for me and lets me see at a glance how the month went. Over time you can take that data and see not how you plan to write over a year, but how you actually write over a year.