Keeping a Record

Another important behaviour to develop to become a productive writer is to measure progress against short term realistic goals. I really believe this works, in my pre-academic life I worked in performance measurement. My whole life was put towards developing measures, agreeing goals to be achieved and trying to mitigate a much as possible the unintended consequences of the targets. I was always amazed at how motivating goal setting and measurement was. It motivated people so much that they would achieve goals - unfortunately often poorly designed - at the expense of good customer service, at the expense of their own personal happiness, at the expense of the long term viability of their jobs.

I think most of this problem comes from making measures and goals simple. They have to be simple to be motivating, so that people can easily see how their behaviour affects their reward. The trouble is that business, just like society at large, is a complex non-linear system and just looking at a few variables gives a very narrow insight into what is happening. Putting targets and therefore basing reward on a small number of variables then inevitably skews the importance of those numbers and what was a finely tuned system becomes unstable. Especially as measures often ended up being quantity rather than quality based.

Fortunately, I don't think this applies much to my writing. I am not writing great literature. As long as what I write is clear and understandable then I think I have passed the quality threshold. Perhaps I will advance to better style over time. What I really need to measure is a count of words written and documents finished. I did attempt to set up a measurement regime on Daytum in an attempt to motivate myself a month or so back. But I overcomplicated  my monitoring - I fell back into my work habits - I thought I would want to break down my writing into detailed charts and figures. I won't. I just need to know I am moving forward. I will keeping simpler records from now on.