Why per-document counters fall short
The word counter built into your editor answers one question: how big is this file right now. That is useful for the file, useless for the habit. It cannot tell you how much you wrote today across everything, it cannot combine a manuscript with a blog post, and it has no idea about your pace or your deadlines. Open three documents and you have three numbers that do not talk to each other.
What you actually want is two views at once: each project on its own, with its own goal and finish date, and a combined view of your total output and streak. The first keeps each book's numbers separate. The second is what keeps you writing on the days when no single project moved much but you still showed up.
The spreadsheet approach (and its tax)
A spreadsheet can do this. A tab per project, a column for the date, a running total, a chart or two. It works, and some writers love it. The cost is maintenance: you build the formulas, you keep the tabs in sync, and you do the per-project pace math by hand. Miss a few days of upkeep and the sheet quietly rots. If that sounds familiar, the guide on tracking writing without spreadsheets covers the trade in more detail, and the Authorlytica vs Excel comparison lays out where a sheet stops paying off.
How a dedicated tracker handles it
A tracker built for this treats each project as a first-class thing. In Authorlytica, that looks like:
- One project per work. The novel, the side draft, the blog each get their own project, goal, and deadline. Three on the free plan, ten on premium.
- Log to the right one. When you finish a session, you pick the project and enter or paste the count. It takes about ten seconds.
- Per-project pace and finish date. Each project tracks its own rolling average and projects its own completion date, so the novel's timeline is not muddied by the blog.
- A combined view. Your overall streak, total words, and stats roll up across every project, so a day split between two of them still counts as a day you wrote.
- Different units side by side. A novel in words and a screenplay in pages each show their own unit, and your combined streak counts both. Editing sessions stay their own type.
The result is the thing a pile of document counters cannot give you: the whole output and each piece of it, in one place.
A note on spreading too thin
One honest caveat. Tracking many projects is easy; finishing them is not. The reason Authorlytica caps active projects at three on the free plan is that most stalled books are not blocked, too many simultaneous WIPs crowd them out. If you find yourself logging tiny amounts across six projects, the tracker is doing its job by making that visible. Often the fix is fewer active projects, not a bigger cap.
The short version
Counting each document separately tells you how big your files are. Tracking projects tells you how your writing is going. If you write across more than one thing at a time, keep each project on its own line, log to the right one, and use a tool that shows both the parts and the whole. The novelist's tracker guide and the full feature overview go deeper if you want them.