
So late last night, I finished the first essay of my late-term essay season.
One thing I do while I write, to keep me motivated, is graph my progress.
Whenever I’m taking a pause to think about how I’m going to word something or what I want to write next, I click on the Word Count button, then divide that number by the number of words I want my essay to be, multiply by one hundred, and plot that according to the number of minutes of work it took me to get to that word count.
So along the y-axis is the percent of the word count and along the x-axis is number of minutes.
I started doing this last year, and I now have a lot of graphs of the rate of my schoolwork. After I finish, I like to look at it and see where I was most efficient, and try to figure out what it is that helped me out so much.
In this case, I took a nap around the 1-hour mark, and then there was a short period of low productivity, but after the nap, I worked harder than ever before.