5 habits of highly motivated novelists [INFOGRAPHIC results from our NaNoWriMo experiment]

Last month, we ran an experiment with the help of over a hundred writers attempting National Novel Writer’s Month. We wanted to understand what it takes to tackle a challenge like NaNoWriMo and actually stick with it. So we asked writers to use RescueTime to track their time for the month of November. The writers were able to use RescueTime’s productivity tools to better understand their time, and we were able to take a look at the the broader data set and see if we could spot any patterns that would shine some light on how to stay motivated for a project like this. When it was all said and done, we recorded 3,097 hours of writing-related activities, which is pretty amazing. We’ve been analyzing the data for the past few days, and have been able to boil it down to a few of the more interesting observations.

Among other things, we found that:

• Authors that logged the most writing time seemed to take regular dinner breaks
• Basically no one wrote anything on Thanksgiving day
• In addition to traditional word processing programs, many people used websites such as Write or Die to stay motivated with their writing

For more insights, click below to enlarge the infographic. If you’d like to use RescueTime to better understand your own productive habits, click here to sign up.

Obviously, we couldn’t have done this study without the help of all the writers that were nice enough to participate. Thanks so much!

If you’d like to analyze your own time and see what kinds of interesting things you can find out about yourself, sign up for a RescueTime account today.