Setting Writing Goals with Atticus

Welcome to Atticus! In this tutorial, I’m going to take you on a brief tour of the goals features you can set up inside Atticus. 

Start by opening your book or starting a new book inside Atticus and clicking on the Writing tab from the top, center of your screen.

If you look to the right, you’ll see a pull out menu titled “More Tools.” 

In this tutorial, we’re interested in the Goals features, which are identified by the target icon.

You have two options: Book Goals and a Writing Habit Tracker. 

Setting Book Goals

In this section you can set your:

1. Total word count for this project
2. The due date, or when you’d like to have your book completed
3. And the days of the week you would like to commit to writing

Once you save your goal, Atticus will calculate how many words you need to write each writing day in order to accomplish your goal.

Writing Habit Tracker

In this section you can enter how many words per day you’d like to set as your goal. If you want, you can refer back to the Book Goals calculation you just set. 

You’ll then want to select your committed writing days and hit save. 

Each day you meet your goal, it will show up as a colored box in the calendar. The daily writing goal icon will turn from a cold, yet inspirational, snowflake to a victorious flame to let you know you’re absolutely on fire with your writing goals!

Atticus will also keep track of your percentages and let you know if you’re on a habit streak, and what your longest streak has been to date.

Setting Writing Goals with Atticus

It’s important to note that your Book Goal data is specific to the book you’re working on when you set up the goal, however the Writing Habit will span across all books and projects that you have in Atticus. If you write sections in multiple books per day, your total written word count will be applied to your Writing Habit tracker.

One final important note is that if you delete a section of your book, it will delete part of your word count for the day. This can cause your goals to become negative, but the tracker will reset tomorrow, so it won’t always be negative. It will only affect your current day, and it will adjust as you write more new content or add the deleted text back to your book.

Sprint Timer

There’s one more feature designed to help you meet your writing goals, and that’s the Sprint Timer. 

Many studies have shown that setting a timer can help you dedicate your attention to a specific task, like writing, and help you be more productive during that time. With the sprint timer, you can set how long you want to write for, and also set a break timer, if you’re planning on doing more than one sprint in a row. 

For example, you can write uninterrupted for 50 minutes knowing that you have a 10 minute break to look forward to.

In no time, you’ll reach your writing goals and have your manuscript ready for editing and formatting!

I hope you find these goal tracking features useful!

Happy writing!