I added the raw word count deficit (i.e., total minus target) because that feels like potentially a motivating data point; rate to finish is cool, but this early in the project, it won’t move much unless I get ahead or behind by an enormous amount. Whereas moving the deficit below zero (i.e., getting ahead) is something I’d like to do–and, in principle, could do–any day.
You can in principle extract the deficit from the top chart, but in practice it’s hard to get a feel for it because you have to subtract out these two linear-ish trends (total and target) with very similar slopes. It’s easy to identify where they cross but not what trends in the difference look like, especially as the magnitude of the difference is small and decreasing relative to the accumulation of both total and target words.
Anyway, the bad news is my deficit is positive; the good news it’s small and not getting bigger with time. If I end the year with 57,700 words instead of 60,000, I’ll still be pretty pleased.
The overall picture here is I’m a few dozen words over rate to finish basically every day. This hasn’t been enough to overcome the few-hundred-word deficit I accumulated in a couple of missed days, but it’s been enough to keep that deficit pretty small.
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