Increase Your Output By Knowing Your Output - Learning Your Words Per Hour

Six years ago, I made a go at writing as my profession for the first time in my life. After denying writing as a viable career option since I was 14, I decided that the fear of writing for the world had to outweigh the frustrations of my job at a chemical plant at the time. Six months into that change, I decided to go full-time with freelancing, based on the contracts I had and the fact that I didn’t see the point in working two jobs anymore.

Despite freelance work not being the right fit for me long-term, it taught me far more about my writing capabilities than I thought I could learn. Not just technical skills, but also skills like time management, scheduling, and business conversations regarding contracts and payments.

However, with regards to writing, the best thing I ever learned from freelancing was my words per hour (WPH). Given any writing task, I can tell you how long that project will take me, down to the hour, because I accidentally created habits to help me focus in while writing. I also got some help along the way from fellow writers and their courses.

I think this one metric matters more in learning how to pace oneself with their writing than any other number. After all, if you don’t know how long something will take to write, you don’t know anything else downstream from that.

And I have a two-week test that turns anyone unsure about their WPH from “I hope I can finish this” into “I know how long this takes.”

This is true of any project, but for writing long works like books and newsletters, I don’t think the concern for most writers is the content of the piece, but the scale of the project. Looking from the outside in, it can be intimidating to think about how a book, which could be 100,000 words or more, will take months to write, even after planning and outlining everything.

I believe that’s why books, and specifically their authors, still hold a degree of authority even in the Digital Age. A book represents someone’s knowledge, or their view of storytelling in the case of fiction, no doubt distilled from years of expertise and who-knows how long worth of the author’s time. Regardless of whether they should or not, many people view large amounts of time invested into a task as worthy and impressive.

That truth is why, I think, I met so many business owners during my freelancing career who wanted to write a book, but didn’t know how to sit down and do it. They’d come to me for ghostwriting services since I knew how to do it, and I was happy to offer the service, but I think these folks psyched themselves up so much on what goes into writing a book that they lost the sprint to the finish before the race started.

Really, it comes down to this: all projects, including writing ones, need a certain number of hours to complete. If you know how fast the rate of work is, you can just divide the project time by the rate to get how long the project will take. Otherwise, you’ll plan things out blind, and introduce frustration and an easy excuse to drop the project since you didn’t understand how long it would take.

In our case, that’s a writer’s WPH. If you know how long it takes you to write something, and how long that piece should be, you can figure out how long it’ll take to write.

Words per hour is the writing equivalent of a car’s speed. It’s a measurement of how many words you can write in an hour, so any time you want to figure that out, just divide your word count by the time it took you to write it.

Easy, right? Unfortunately, I know that it isn’t because not all projects are the same. Different topics will take longer for any given writer, and there are always the factors outside the writing itself, like sleep, ability to focus for a given time, and so on. Complications always manage to find their way into things.

So, the easy argument against knowing your words per hour would be that not all writing is the same, and as I laid out above, I agree with that. But that doesn’t mean that you can ignore this metric since it affects your output regardless of whether you have a good or bad measurement.

Overall, I think you can bucket your writing rate into two broad categories:

Many of the writers I’ve met try to keep as much of their work in the “Prepped” category as possible, which I agree with. Having an outline of what you want to talk about and how you’ll do it is the writing equivalent of the “measure twice, cut once” idiom. That’s how I’ve written basically every freelance piece in my life, and how I approach almost all of my writing today.

But, of course, there are times where you need to sit down and write regardless of prep. Whether this be for stream-of-consciousness exercises, or you’re just trying to get words onto the page for a later draft, knowing how long that style of writing takes matters as well, since it usually represents a baseline.

I didn’t understand that when I first started freelancing, admittedly. I did the prep work because it felt natural, but all the math and process thinking about my output? That came a few years later when I stumbled across one of the most influential courses I took about writing.

Early on in my freelancing career, I realized I didn’t know enough about the technical aspects of writing. Sure, I had my education from school, and a lot of exposure to the craft by just doing it, but there was a clear gap between my explainable understanding of writing and the act of doing it. I could write, but I couldn’t tell you why I could write.

I figured if I learned about how other folks view their writing, I could better understand mine. One of the resources I landed on was Jessica Brody’s Productivity for Writers course. I’m in no way associated with Ms. Brody or Udemy; the link there exists just as proof of what I found that you can check out if you like.

Either way, among many other concepts covered in the course, Brody shares a spreadsheet that helps writers figure out their daily output. You’d write for as long as you can, record the number of words you wrote in the spreadsheet, and it would tell you what your average daily word count was.

Because Brody is a fiction writer, she focuses on the daily output because that’s an easy time period to look at for the months-long process that is drafting a long fiction piece. But, at that time, I wasn’t working on my fiction, but writing several articles per day. Tracking a moving average for one project doesn’t help me understand my output for as many as four articles per day.

But it did give me inspiration for something else: what if I tallied up my word count for one article against the time it took to write that article, and then calculated things out by the hour? I already needed to set hourly rates for my freelance work, so a per-hour metric made sense at the time.

I also knew that I really only had three, maybe four good hours to write in me each day before my brain would turn to mush, so measuring my writing by the day wouldn’t be accurate either.

So, if I knew my hourly word rate, and that I could write for three or four hours each day, I’d then know my sustainable capacity for writing, and therefore my ideal output for each day.

With that in mind, I set up those tests, and discovered this about myself:

Bingo, the numbers I was looking for. Those figures gave me the ability to work on anything and never miss a deadline because of what I learned from running that experiment inspired by Jessica Brody’s frameworks.

So, let’s get you the tools you need to run the same thing for yourself.

The way I calculated my WPH worked because of what I was working on at the time. While I think that method still works, I’d suggest someone be more intentional about it, especially if they aren’t writing on the regular when doing this test.

Either way, the setup is simple:

To help you along with this experiment, I made a WPH Tracker for you to use. All the math will be done for you in the spreadsheet, so don’t worry if you aren’t a geek like I am. You just need to fill it out and be honest when you do so.

I cannot stress enough that this experiment works best when you do it for the 14 days straight. The goal here is much like the 7 Essays freebie that I offer to all my newsletter subscribers, just focused on a different angle. Rather than creating a writing habit like in the freebie, this WPH experiment is figuring out what level of output is sustainable for you.

All of this is in service of a framework in use here called MCSS. It’s an acronym that stands for Measure, Compare, Scope, Sustain:

In other words, this experiment can help you take the habit formed from that freebie and turn it into a sustainable writing output that can radically change your life. I think a 14-day sacrifice is worth that.

Once you run the experiment and fill out everything on the Tracker tab, the Results & Planning tab will break down all the math and give you some insight on how long certain projects will take.

First thing you’ll notice is that I give both the average and median WPH values from your run. Averages can be skewed by really high or really low outputs, and since each writing type only gets seven days, I wanted you to have both figures to make planning easier. The median value is what I recommend you go off of since it won’t be skewed by any wide shifts in your output during the experiment.

Also, you’ll see that the Prepped part of the experiment has both a Session and Drafting WPH. The Session WPH figures will calculate across the entire span of time, meaning it applies both the planning phase and the writing phase of the 60 minutes to your output. The Drafting WPH just factors in the time you spent writing.

Use the Session WPH if you want to bake planning into your writing output estimates for other projects, or the Drafting WPH if you want to count planning separately. I don’t care which approach you use so long as you stay consistent with it.

You’ll notice I’m not saying that you pick any specific day to represent your output, but instead the aggregate of the data you collected. I do this deliberately because I know it’s exciting to think about how a great day could be replicated across multiple days for your output, but it isn’t always tenable to achieve that.

You’ll also see that I don’t give reports WPH for other writers in the tracker. And I don’t want you looking up other writers’ outputs during or right after running this experiment, either. Too many people compare themselves to writers that do this professionally, and that comparison steals the joy of writing from too many writers-to-be.

You’ve seen the amount of work and setup I need to do to achieve my WPH. If you don’t have habits and a practiced focus like that, it’s hard to repeat my output. That’s not to say that you can’t, but that I recommend folks go off of their median outputs to try and prevent disappointment or burnout that can happen from trying to go too fast too soon.

So, run this experiment, get your data, and accept it for what it is. The numbers will change over time, but this gives you a baseline to work from, and that’s the goal here.

With your median WPH figured out, you can take that to most any writing project you have in mind for yourself and see how long it’ll take to complete. The bottom half of the Results & Planning tab is a section dedicated to helping you do exactly that.

Much like the Tracker tab, the Planning section has several cells that you can fill in based on the numbers you have in mind for your project. All you have to do is fill in the five spaces of word count, WPH, safety factor, hours per day, and days per week writing, and everything else will be done for you.

I plan on touching on the safety factor in a moment, but let’s touch on the other cells to fill in first.

I recommend that you treat this planning section as exactly that: a plan, not a rigid cage to trap yourself. If you don’t know what number to plug in for something, use your best guess. I know from personal experience that books, for example, end up needing more or fewer words than what you initially expect once you’re in there writing.

We aren’t trying to get an exact date for when the book will be done in this tracker. Instead, we’re getting a ballpark based on what we’re using as our best estimate. Over time, your estimates will better align with what you actually need, but that’s a skill that develops with repetition, much like any other.

As for the safety factor I added to the planning section, let’s talk about it here. Something that bothers me to no end in a lot of plans is that they focus on the ideal output as the expected output, meaning there’s no room for mistakes, misfortune, illness, or any other complications that we all know can enter into the scene.

I think if someone plans that way, they’re out of touch because that person isn’t making a plan; they’re making a prison of false expectations. Since I don’t want you to be out of touch, I added in that safety factor as a way to account for the fact that life is tough sometimes.

I assume that, given a long enough period of time, I will probably achieve about 80% of what I want to do, especially since I tend to give myself pretty lofty goals. I think that practice is good for you to adopt as well, including the 80% true output I mentioned. Doing so means that you will have a goal that you can achieve even on days that you feel crappy, something low and that still moves the needle for your writing, even if it otherwise wouldn’t feel like it.

However, I do believe in Parkinson’s Law, which states that a task will expand to fill whatever time it’s given. I want you to have room to ease off the gas if life sucks, but I don’t want you to have so much grace that it never feels urgent and you therefore never write.

Expect that you can write 80% of your ideal WPH each day. Always push for 100%, or higher if you think you can, but the acceptance of 80% means you’re still making good progress, even on rough days.

Words per hour is one of the most important figures a writer can know about their output. It informs all other aspects of how that writer can approach a project, ranging from books to content pushes to crafting freelance articles. Because I want more writers to know this figure so they can better plan their projects, I wanted to talk about that today.

I really think that, regardless of whether you don’t know your writing output or if you know roughly what your WPH is, you should still grab the WPH Tracker and give it a test. Hell, feel free to adjust the spreadsheet to adjust the writing blocks, the number of days you run each experiment, any of those variables.

Don’t change the runs for both the cold and prepped WPH, though. I really want to be clear what a little forethought can do for your writing. It’s fun to write just off vibes sometimes, but vibes alone won’t get your book done.

Either way, check out the WPH Tracker and everything else we’ve talked about here. Run the 7/7 Test, experience what it’s like to apply the MCSS framework to your writing, and tell me how it goes.

My guess is that, by knowing how much you can write with data, you’ll be able to both write more, and do so in a way that doesn’t burn you out.

It happened to me, and I bet it’ll work for you, too.