A little something I have been playing around with in the tiny scraps of free time I have is some Google App Scripts that allow me to automate the presentation of some of my writing metrics. Or, in simpler terms: automatically create charts based on my writing data. This is still a work-in-progress, but here is how my automated dashboard is looking as of this morning:

The biggest benefit of these scripts is that they save me the time of having to create the charts manually from the data. I can open my spreadsheet, click on a menu option, and the charts update automatically. This means that not only is my data collected automatically, while I write, but the charts are now created automatically. And I can spend my time writing instead of manually collecting data and building charts.

By the way, the data for the “Writing Minutes/Day” chart comes from the new scripts I’ve written to track the time I spend writing, in addition to the words.