Congratulations on creating your plan on Pacemaker! Now that you have a map highlighting the route you’ll take to get to your writing goal, it’s time to learn how to mark your progress as you go along.
As with every feature on Pacemaker, we’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible to track progress. Let’s go through step by step.
Finding your Plan
Once a plan is saved, you can access it on your left sidebar under ‘today’s to-dos’ (if there is work scheduled for that day), or on your Full Plan List page. Clicking the name of your plan will open your plan page.
Adding Progress
From your plan page, click ‘Progress’ on the top right of the screen to add progress. Here you will see the current date displayed, as well as the target work calculated for that particular day. Input your day’s progress in the Progress field, then click ‘Save’ or ‘Save Progress’.
If you’ve had multiple work sessions in a day, you can click the blue ‘+’ button next to the current date to add progress from other sessions to the same day’s total progress.
When you’re done adding all your progress for all sessions worked at the time of updating, click ‘Save Progress’, and savour the moment because at Pacemaker, we celebrate progress not just overall completion, and you should too!
Remember, the amount you add in the progress field is determined by the progress modifier you set when creating your plan. We had selected to record our progress as ‘Daily Completed Work’, so when adding progress, we add only what we did on the day. If we had selected to record our progress as ‘Overall Completed Work’, the amount we would put in the progress field would be our new total word count.
You can even add progress to days in the past once those days are within your plan’s date range. Simply click the ‘Add Progress’ button and a calendar will drop down. All editable dates will be clickable. Select the date in the past you’d like to update, enter the progress, save, and there you have it!
Viewing your Daily Work vs Overall Progress with graph display
You’ll notice that when you click ‘Save Progress’ you will be taken to your plan’s Progress page. If you’re using a graph display as we are, this page will contain two displays, one which shows your daily work and the other which shows your progress.
The Daily Work display is always on top and this shows your actual daily work (progress) in relation to your target quota for the day (plan).
The Overall Progress display is always on the bottom and this shows your overall progress (total work count) in relation to your plan. If you selected, “I want my plan to adjust based on my progress”, your Overall Progress graph will recalculate your targets so you will always have one line.
If you selected, “I want my plan to stay the same as I work”, your overall progress line and your planned work line will always be separate lines. When the overall progress line is lower than your original planned work line (as in our example), that means you’re behind your schedule. If it’s merged with the line, you’re on track, if it’s above, you’re ahead!
The cool thing about selecting the first option where your plan adjusts based on your progress is that every time you log progress that’s below or above your original planned work, your plan will automatically adjust so that you maintain your pace moving forward!
Editing your plan
We pride ourselves on having a planning tool which respects the rhythms of your real life. That means, life happens sometimes and even our best-laid plans can’t be executed as we originally intended.
Should that happen with your Pacemaker plan, rest assured that you can edit your plan at any time to adjust the 7 modifiers you set when creating your plan. If you need to extend or shorten your deadline, you can do that. If you need to increase or decrease the intensity of your working pace or adjust the days/weeks where you do more or less or skip, you can do that too! You could even change the way you want to record and view your progress! Did you write more than you expected by your halfway point? No worries, the tool can adjust for that. How about if you’re woefully behind? The tool can adjust for that too. We’re committed to showing you multiple ways to get where you want to go from wherever you happen to be now.
Once you make any changes though, don’t forget to save!
We’ve tried to make progress logging and tracking as easy and intuitive as possible, but we’re always looking for opportunities to make these processes even more so. If you think of a way we can streamline the progress logging and tracking experience further, we’d love to hear about it!
As always, thanks for using Pacemaker!