On Using a Collaborative Writing Tracker

Charlotte

As a writing professor, I think a lot about how writing can happen. For more than a dozen years I’ve led a faculty writing boot camp at my college, and I use differing strategies, some from NCFDD and also from my grad school bestie Erin Flanagan, a fiction writer with whom I’ve shared a writing accountability log for nearly a decade. She’s written about how the data from these logs not only reflects but affects her writing process: “The first draft took 13 months, but it was only 91 hours [spent writing] … So it wasn’t that I spent hours and hours at the computer, but weeks and weeks avoiding the work.”

Since much of advising ends up being about the processes and barriers to writing, not just the content itself, I thought if graduate advisees could see and study the reality of their writing lives, it may have an impact. I created the Hogg Advisees Club, where each of us—including me—would set monthly writing goals and log what we’d done. On a Google Sheet, we each had a column with the date, time and running total listed alongside each other.

Courtesy of the authors

My advisees already emailed check-ins to me, but I wanted us to have the mindsets of working writers. We did that collaboratively for nearly two years, through job changes, job insecurities, childbirth and dissertation paths that differed. I asked for us to reflect on the log after the first year, prompting:

1. Audit: How many minutes did you work per week? Was that higher or lower than you expected? Higher or lower than you wanted?
2. How did the accountability help or hurt (Guilt? Encouragement? both?) Did it make a difference that I tracked my time with you?

1. What kept you from writing more? What reflections do you have on how you want to versus how you [actually] prioritize your writing?

This led to ongoing discussions and increased awareness of writing goals and habits. Over lunch I told Nataly that, if she considers how the university “counts” research time—as problematic as that is—she’d spend at least 10 hours a week writing her dissertation alongside teaching and service. The two others had full-time jobs, so 10 hours a week wasn’t workable, but they still expressed surprise with their hourly averages of writing. Sean noted his logged hours were “higher than I expected, but lower than what I wanted to work.”

As their adviser, before the log, I truly didn’t know how much they worked and neither did they, so the data—and reflection on the data—did the heavy lifting in terms of motivating them. This relieved me of assuming the kind of parenting dynamic I’d like to avoid (“Did you finish your chores?”). I didn’t comment on their logs (save an occasional “yay!”) but listened to their reflections on them. It was my hope that sharing the highs and lows of my own writing consistency modeled for them a marathon-type writing practice that they could carry beyond the particular beast of the dissertation for any future writing they do.

Below, the other members of HAC share their perspectives.

Sean

When I was struggling to make time to work on my dissertation while working outside academia, the idea of tracking my time seemed like the last thing I would want to do—and, to be fair, for a while, it was.

I work a 9 to 5, which is not as peppy as Dolly Parton’s melody made it out to be. While COVID made the when and where of the 9 to 5 more flexible, I still had to give an accurate account of the hours I worked on a given day. So tracking my time wasn’t a new concept to me, but it was similar to what I had to do at my job. Complicating matters, I have spent much of my career working as a consultant, where my work hours are split into smaller categories that all eventually equate to billable and nonbillable time. My yearly performance evaluations inevitably would give more weight to the former: Was I “productive”? Did I make the company enough money this year?

So I was a bit resistant. But the HAC log seemed to naturally (or intentionally) account for this. Soon, the HAC time logs became not the “place where Sean logs how much he’s worked and still feels like he’s getting nowhere,” but a collaborative space to make our labor visible. There, seeing my progress alongside others’, I learned there are many ways to use time and as many definitions for what’s productive. Additionally, the group organically cultivated a sense of our time as opposed to just my time. Logging became a freeing experience rather than a constraining one.

Nataly

Tracking my time in the HAC writing log gave me the opportunity to think about how I value my time and what I define as work. The former allowed me to be kinder to myself. The days when I would log less than 30 minutes (5 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes) stand out because they showed that whatever time I spent mattered enough to record it in the log. Yes, 120 minutes a day would be ideal, but did I use that block productively? On the other hand, those 5 or 15 minutes I logged often felt like 120 minutes because the HAC shifted my mindset to see all time logged (no matter how small) as valuable. When I became a mom and the amount of time I could dedicate to work was limited, I wasn’t discouraged; the log had shown me that I could accomplish a lot even in small chunks.

Relatedly, tracking my time in the HAC writing log taught me to question what I define as work worthy of logging. I think if I had not had the writing log there would have been many days when the work I did would have felt insignificant. Writing a page or two a day would be another ideal and worth logging, but so was looking for sources or revising my argument on the back of an electric bill.

So often we have our eye on the prize—and it is important not to lose sight of that—but when there are delays (or a baby on the way), that prize becomes more difficult to see. Having a place where I could see how much time I put into my work reminded me I was moving forward even when, in the short term, detours pushed the end result a little farther into the distance.

Ashley

The data we collect can help us design more sustainable writing lives when we reconsider what counts as meaningful progress. While our group’s shared tracking practices emphasized time spent writing, I often added my word count for each writing session, operating under the assumption that more data equals better. However, looking back, my data revealed potential limits of traditional productivity measures such as word count.

I now see in the data where I overemphasized quantifiable output at the expense of other success metrics. On the rare days I could just be with my project for longer stretches of time, I had breakthroughs that propelled my thinking forward. Then I distilled that thinking into concise prose. On paper, the contrast between the hours spent and words produced was stark.

My data show I often gave up on tracking my word count for these longer writing sessions despite typically logging this metric. In short, my measurement practices collapsed when my perceived productivity decreased, suggesting productivity models may subtly reinforce burnout rather than sustained engagement for some writers.

One solution is shifting toward metrics that more fully capture the quality of intellectual labor and foreground purpose over productivity. For me, this meant focusing on the shared Google Sheet as more than a tracker: It was a tool for motivating each other and making visible the otherwise invisible and often isolated labor of working toward a finished product.

Our shared Google Sheet may seem like a simple tool these days, a handprint on a cave wall marking our presence across time and space. We returned to this shared surface to record our writing time, connecting through the evidence that we were here, we were writing and we were not alone. Our use of this tool was easy, elegant and reliable in its execution, something sorely needed while dissertating. We could look back in time and find evidence of our dedication and progress—and, on the best days, we found one another entering minutes in real time, a small nudge to keep us all writing another day.