I like numbers. Not nearly as much as I like words, mind you. I won’t go so far as to say that numbers don’t lie, because you can manipulate numbers almost as easily as you can manipulate words. When used with the appropriate amount of caution, however, numbers do a pretty good job of telling you where you’re at. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Apply Ass to Chair
This year, I told myself I wanted to write more. That I am a better and happier person when I make that time for myself. Ultimately, though, I didn’t write as much as I had wanted to. We moved, I got out of the habit of waking up at 6, the words didn’t make it onto the page.
| Month | Days | Hours | Words | Blogging | Railroad |
| January | 28 | 21.40 | 9613 | 1 | 26 |
| February | 20 | 13.10 | 0 | – | 20 |
| March | 11 | 8.17 | 0 | – | 11 |
| April | 2 | 1.13 | 0 | – | 2 |
| May | – | – | – | – | – |
| June | – | – | – | – | – |
| July | – | – | – | – | – |
| August | 1 | 0.60 | 0 | – | 2 |
| September | – | – | – | – | – |
| October | – | – | – | – | – |
| November | 15 | 12.80 | 955 | 8 | 7 |
| December | 17 | 14.60 | 3323 | 8 | 9 |
| Totals | 94 | 71.80 | 13891 | 16 | 77 |
| Average | 13 | 10.26 | 1984 | 5 | 11 |
The result? I only wrote 94 out of 365 days this year. That averages out to about 1 in every 4 days. And the months I thought I was doing ok, particularly November and December, were slimmer than I would have liked. I’m also doing about as much blogging as writing, which is a bit surprising. The Monday posts usually take me about three hours to put together, so I need to get better at condensing that time or working on blog posts at night, to gra
b mornings back for novel writing.
Get Moving
I’d planned to go into Cardio Trainer, the app I use to track exercise, and pull out stats on how far I went, how often, and so on. Unfortunately, the app no longer links up with my Google account, and I had to hard reset my phone about a month ago. So it looks like I’m in the market for a new app.
Without data, I can tell you that my exercise numbers are the inverse of the writing numbers – I was out and about way more often in the spring and summer. I picked Z up from school on the bike a bunch of times, we did long walks in the stroller in the space between dinner and bed, and weekends saw us hiking the trails in town.
Reading
According to Goodreads,* I read 34 books this year. Most of those were sci-fi, fantasy, or historical fiction. I read one non-fiction book – The Bully Pulpit by Doris Keans Goodwin – and it took me the whole year to get through it. I have also pretty much entirely switched to reading eBooks. In fact, the only print book I recall reading is God’s War, by Kameron Hurley, and that was because I picked up the first two books of the Bel Dame series at Half-Price. I don’t have precise stats (although I’ll start doing this for next year), but from a scan of authors I read 1 book by a non-US authors, no books by non-white authors, and 22 books by female authors.
*You might have to friend me to see the link.
Travel
I traveled a lot this year – enough to earn elite status for the first time with an airline. Google maps says I took 26 trips, but when I break that down a lot of it is travel around town. Google also had a bit of a rough time with the move from NY to CA, telling me I took several trips to and around California in the first few months we lived here. My rough estimate is 8 trips, evenly split between business and pleasure. I went to four states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and DC, and one country, Poland. The places I went most often in 2015 were my sister-in-law’s house, Z’s daycare, SFO, Target (!), various parks and playgrounds, JFK, and REI.
Final Thoughts
My biggest takeaway from this is that you get out of tracking what you put in. The writing stats don’t really show blog posts or word count from earlier in the year because I didn’t really track those until the last few months. My Goodreads count is a bit lower than it should be, largely because I’m not great at actually adding things to Goodreads. As for Google… well, it thinks I took a ferry ride that cut through El Sobrante and Richmond!
On a more serious note, doing this has helped me start thinking about my goals for 2016. I expect I’ll be putting that post up some time in the next few weeks.
