Now that I've been using this program for a full month, I figured it was about time I did a review of it.
I LOVE THIS APP. I can't tell you that enough. I'm an ADD writer; I cannot focus on one single project to the exclusion of all others. That way lies madness, and a crippling case of writer's block. In any given day, I can work on as many as 10 projects... I have a personal commandment that goes "I shall not open a document and close it again without writing at least 100 words". 100 words is about 5 sentences, a couple of paragraphs. Even if they're rubbish and don't make the final cut, 100 words is at least progress.
However, keeping track of all those words becomes a bit of an exercise in spreadsheets, and consequently I never really had any idea of what my average output really was... because it was all Too Hard.
Enter WordKeeperAlpha.
Once you've created your account, you can set up your projects with final goals and even daily targets. WKA will automatically update these as you work. Here's my targets and achieved writings on one of my current projects:
I have a Project set up for everything I'm working on, so that I can enter it in my word logs and I can see how much progress I'm making on each work.
Entering a new word log is simple; I mostly use Scrivener's Project Targets window to help me keep track of what I've written in any given session, but in just about any word processing program you can highlight your new writing and select Word Count to see how many words are contained in the highlighted section.
Then you just go to the UPDATE section of the WKA window, enter the number of words, the date, which project the words were in, and Log Words.
Simple. The more projects you have the more colourful your graph gets.
This is where one or two flaws in the program do show up, though. There are a limited number of colours and some of them look very, very similar, so if you have a lot of projects on the go like I do, sometimes it's difficult to tell what's what at a glance. I messaged Seth, creator of WordKeeperAlpha, and he promised that this is something that will be fixed in his next update. Along with customisable colours, and a Daily Total, one other thing that is curiously missing. I had to add up my day totals manually. Easy enough if you just have one project because all you do is hover over the bar for that day, but a little more tricky if you've worked on half a dozen or so!
The green line with the dots on it shows your daily average, and it became a self-challenge for me to push it up above the 2k mark and keep it there. I was really proud that I managed to hit 65k in January; my original target was 50k for the month and I do believe that seeing such a good visual representation of my progress really helped.
I HIGHLY recommend WordKeeperAlpha. It's a fantastic record-keeping tool, and I found it to be an amazing motivator as well.
And best of all, it's COMPLETELY FREE!!!!
How good is THAT?