I love charts. I feel when I make a chart, I’m organized. Plus, I like the sense of accomplishment I get when I change text color/enter page counts/cross off what I’ve accomplished. One of the things I loved about Nano was the chart and the progress I saw. It’s one of the reasons I love the word counter bars.

Here’s how I keep track of my contests. This was before I got Excel. If you can see the numbers, you can see how many contests I’ve entered the past 5 years. And this isn’t all of them – I used to delete the contests I didn’t final in. Now to keep track, I change those entries to pink. Blue means finalled, red is outstanding and black is planned but not yet entered.



I got this chart from Kresley Cole. It’s a very cool page count tracker and includes a pie chart. You get encouraging comments if you reach your daily goal, and butt-kicking if you don’t. I don’t use this one as much as I used to.



I made this at the end of last year. This is my life at a glance. I find it really hard to keep up with, though. I like that it has everything going on in a week, but … maybe too overwhelming.



This is very simple, but also very easy to keep track. I only have my writing goals on it, each story in a different color. If I get ahead, I cross out ahead, if I get behind, I divvy up the lack among the remaining days. It’s my current favorite, and I have one for each month for the rest of the year.



But making charts can be time consuming – it’s a great procrastinator, but can also be a great motivator. Do you use charts to keep you on track?