Part of taking on any writing challenge is admitting how much time you have to commit. Writing is one of those skills that takes time both to learn and utilize. Ignoring that fact won’t necessarily harm your writing, but it does make writing challenges much more difficult.

Here’s a super simple tracker for the June 30 days to 60k challenge designed to help you be a little more realistic.

By default, the daily goal for June is 2,000 words. That might seem like a lot, but here’s the catch:

If you type around the average pace (approximately 65 words a minute) then you can do 2,000 in thirty minutes, provided you have the necessary story material (I’ll cover that on Wednesday, outlines optional).

There’s a two-fold problem to hitting that 2,000 word mark on the daily though.

Time and commitment.

Time is solved by knowing your writing speed. To figure that out, set a timer for ten minutes. Go write. As soon as that timer goes off, STOP. Do not finish that sentence. Do not keep going. STOP.

Count how many words you have (most word processors will do this for you automatically). Divide that by ten. You now have your average writing speed, which is how many words you can write in one minute.

Notice I say writing here and not ‘typing’ speed. Many typing tests will give you the text to type. Because you’re also coming up with those words, those tests are inaccurate. You need to know how fast you can come up with words and write them down, not how fast you can type.

Now that you have your writing speed, divide that 2,000 daily goal by your writing speed. For me that’s 65 words a minute, so it breaks down into slightly over 30 minutes to reach 2,000. Estimates are okay! We just need to know about how much time we’re looking to commit.

You know how fast you write, and roughly long that will take you. That means the ‘time’ part is solved. Now we need to solve the second one: Commitment.

There’s a few key phrases that get under a writer’s skin, and one of those is ‘I wish I had time to write’. The truth is, writers don’t have the time either—even indie authors who make writing their full time job are juggling the time required to do marketing, editing, cover design, campaign planning, inventory management, more marketing, maybe jot down some notes for the book they’re helping edit, and then finally, writing. It’s probably not time you’re lacking: it’s commitment.

That isn’t to say you have all the time in the world to write your book. Commitments eat up a huge part of our day. Work, education, family obligations and social events are also commitments, many of which we can’t Ignore or reschedule.

That’s where marking out your days come in handy. If you haven’t already, print off a copy of the simple tracker, or grab a blank calendar for June. I use a digital planner, so the following screenshots are from my tablet.

Mark each day you know you won’t be able to write. I have a rotating schedule at my day job, which means some weekdays are zero capacity days for me. On other days, I may have some ability to get a little writing done, but those aren’t guaranteed days. For that reason, I trimmed my goal on those days down to 1500 words on those days.

I also have other commitments a couple of days this month that I’m able to move. Those days will remain at 2,000 words, but they’re marked just in case I don’t end up writing.

The remaining days I need to write around 4000 words to stay on track. For me, that’s about an hour to an hour and a half of work. This is still easily doable, but because I know the unexpected happens, I also want to block in days that will be ‘writing only’. In other words, I specifically want days where my only obligation is writing. That means saying no to everything else.

This is what my calendar now looks like with writing only days marked in. Note I didn’t adjust my word count goals for the days I plan for dedicated writing. The reason is simple:

Pro tip: The days I selected for writing only are days I plan to host the live write-ins over on Bluesky. If you need a little accountability, come join me!

I also added the story I plan to work on and the author name. Make it official. This is your plan to commit to your story.

I’m giving myself permission to fail.

Things don’t always go the way we plan. Emergencies don’t wait for a good spot on the calendar. Sometimes in the middle of writing we realize we need to rewrite, or there’s a ‘got stuck in a research rabbit-hole for two hours’ day. I may very well end up staring at the blinking cursor for three hours in a spiral of existential dread.

Having permission to fail means that if for whatever reason, I can’t make my goal, I have the ability to get up and try again the next day. It means bad days aren’t a reason to quit.

This is a challenge. Challenges aren’t meant to be easy. But, failure is an option and not a limiter. You have a story to write. The only true failure is not writing at all.

You can download or print off the 30 Days to 60k Simple Tracker right here, no email required. Fill it out and show it off! I’m over on Bluesky @fictionseed.com and on Tumblr @fictseed or you can link back to this post.