To piggyback on my post from 2020 about my anxiety on how often I blog, I decided to measure how much I write even if it’s not being published here. One year ago, I installed WordCounter. This MacOS MenuBar app synchronizes via iCloud between my iMac and MacBook Pro and sits in the menu bar diligently counting every word. The corner grows each time I hit the space bar. It’s fun to watch if I am not watching what I’m writing. This application keeps track of words per hour, per day and per app. I can see today’s break down even though I have 2 more meetings tonight:
I also have the last 7 days:
And last 30:
And last 365:
I spend nearly every waking hour communicating with others. It’s not always easy or fun but it’s necessary to pay my bills and put food in my belly. Writing, Replying, Reacting and Communicating has become my livelihood. I wanted to see in the last year just how much I’ve written. One bug with WordCounter is key commands also count so while I haven’t written any words in Adobe Lightroom, it says I’ve written 4400. Those are just key commands and the system isn’t perfect. You can exclude some apps though as a way around it.
What I wanted to see was how much I spend in writing applications per year; This would be MarsEdit, Microsoft Word, Slack, Mail, Safari and ByWord. I wish it broke down written words by website so I could see WordPress.com versus Office.com and Reddit.com
Here are the apps I wrote over 1500 words in during 2021:
- Safari 479,266
- Mail 371,618
- Word 33,017
- Messages 31,165
- Slack 23,325
- MarsEdit 16,914
- Teams 11,111
- Excel 6,828
- Powerpoint 6,137
- Outlook 5,847
- TextEdit 4,597
- Byword 3,570
- BBEdit 3,357
- Zoom 1,944
998,696, man, honestly only 1 blog post short of writing 1 million words in 2021 just in these apps alone. If I throw in the apps that did not make the cut like Acrobat or OneNote and Miro, I’d be well over 1 million words in a year. It would appear that if I could have devoted my 2021 to writing 10-14 fiction novels instead. :) How very Stephen King of me so long as I could actually come up with that many stories worth publishing.
Last 365 days officially says I wrote 1,041,677 words but again, that does include some key strokes and commands.
I don’t think 1 million is much and I’d challenge some of my readers to install WordCounter and see for themselves. You may be surprised how many words you write specifically if you were a MacOS developer and using Xcode…every space bar stroke equals a word. I’m guessing the return key counts as well?
Anyway, I’ll try to remember doing this again in 2023 for this calendar year. It certainly was an interesting academic exercise.