The Real Daily Word Count (and why stressing over daily word counts is unnecessary)

Hey look, a post that’s not entirely about teaching or the beginning of the year for once!

Taking a break from all of that for a moment, I actually wanted to touch on a topic that is so important to me but I never really talk about: writing. I consider myself a writer. I’ve written two books now (neither will be published) and am currently working on another (which, best case scenario after drafting and editing, will be ready to query at the end of the year). I follow the #WritingCommunity on Twitter and try to be at least somewhat active, participating in things like Camp Nanowrimo or #Pitmad.

What I see people stressing out over a lot is their daily word count. See, for some reason, we’ve all got it in our heads that we should be writing a set number of words per day on our projects. Generally speaking, 2000 words a day is considered the ideal. When people don’t hit that number, I see them worry that they aren’t good enough. “Oh, but Stephen King says he writes that much per day, and if I expect to be published I have to write that much.”

Hogwash.

The reality is, we write a lot more than just what gets put on the page for our projects. I got curious, and so this last week, I decided to look at all the words I write across multiple areas and turn them into a daily average. The categories I took into account for my word count are:

• Project writing (as in, the number of words I write towards my book)
• Emails (both personal and professional)
• Lesson Plans (as I am a teacher and you’d be surprised)
• Blog Posts

There are a few things I didn’t account for, such as Tweets and texts. I mostly chose to ignore them simply because trying to get an accurate word count would be near-impossible (seriously, try to get a word count on your text messages. Not worth it.), and also because these word counts can vary wildly from week to week depending on what’s going on. So, let’s get started!

Project Writing

Luckily, acquiring a word count for my project writing is suuuuuuuuper easy, since I use Scrivener to write my stories and you get an automatic word count at the bottom.

Unfortunately for me and my sample, the week when I chose to do this was a bad week, productivity-wise. Beginning of year teacher meetings were happening all throughout the week, and on top of that Horizon: Zero Dawn came to PC and I was a little preoccupied there, too (hey, honesty!). As a result, my total word count for last week was only 4,513 words.

Divide that by 7, and you get a daily average of approximately 645 words.

Not great, but honestly it could be worse. On with the next count!

Emails

A couple of things to note about my process: I literally went through every email I sent during the given week, copied the text, and pasted it into a Drive document where I could more-easily acquire a word count. I intentionally left out parts like my email signature and phrases like “good morning” that I use in literally every email, because I wanted to try and not inflate the numbers.

That said…oof. I definitely thought I was going to have more words here.

Out of the 89 emails sent during that week-long period, the total number of words came to just 934 words. Yeah. Turns out that even though I wrote a lot of emails, a good number of them were just a few words long, and so didn’t contribute much. Oh, well.

Averaging them out across 7 days, the daily word count became 133 words. Not a lot, but, again, honestly not awful.

Lesson Plans (and associated documents)

For those of you who are unfamiliar, teachers create lesson plans as an overview of what we’re doing in the classroom. Some teachers go by day, some by week, others by unit, and others just straight up don’t make lesson plans at all (crazy buggers, they are). My lesson plans vary based on what’s happening, but are typically done by-week.

Now, to get this count, I considered not only the number of words in lesson plans (sans pieces like our state standards, which aren’t my own words), but also the number of words in the documents and presentations I created. This was a bit tricky, since so many of those documents and presentations are worked on collaboratively with other teachers in my campus and district, and so I only took the word counts from items where I created it entirely on my own. Messy, but it works.

Interestingly enough, the total number of words from this side ended up being my largest category, coming in at a whopping 8,770 words total. I might go a bit overboard in detail on my lesson plans. What can I say, I’m a perfectionist.

Dividing by the number of days in the week, the average word count was approximately 1,253 words per day. Oof. That’s a lot.

Blog Posts

This one was easy: I only had one blog post that I worked on during the week I considered for the word counts, and it was only 837 words. Even though it only took me two days to write (and that was mostly just because I was writing it entirely from my phone, mind you), I still divided by 7 to get the average of about 120 words per day. Small, but not unexpected.

The Big Kahuna

Alright. So I found out all the averages of those categories. Now all I had to do was add them up, and I would get a nice big daily average for the whole week.

In total, my average daily word count that week was 2,151 words.

Huh. Would you look at that. So even though I only wrote an average of about 650 words per day on my actual writing project, overall I actually hit that 2K writing word mark. Isn’t that something?

Here’s the point of this experiment: to show you that the word count on your writing projects isn’t something to stress out over. The reality is that we write a lot, all the time. Many of us have jobs that aren’t writing/book-based, and even those of you that do are probably still writing reviews, creating blog posts of your own, or are writing letters. Don’t stress over whether you hit a certain benchmark each day. Especially right now, with everything going on, you’ve got to give yourself a little grace and accept that it’s okay to not be perfect.

At the end of the day, what matters is that you’re okay. Focus on that, and everything else will fall into place.