The Writing Dashboard.

A novel gets finished a few hundred words at a time over a great many days, and the hard part of that arithmetic is knowing, on any given evening, whether today counted. The dashboard keeps the record: a daily goal with a seven-day view of how often you met it, the words and minutes of the current session, and a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the manuscript so far.

Daily goal and streak.

You set a daily word goal and a target length for the book, and the dashboard shows today's count against the goal and the manuscript total against the target. Below the goal, a row of seven squares shows which of the last seven days met it, counted in your local calendar so the row turns over at your midnight rather than at some server's. There are no badges attached to the streak; it is a record you can read and act on.

Session words are measured as the change in the manuscript's word count since you opened the book, so a day spent cutting a chapter shows as what it was.

Manuscript progress
70,733words
100%70,000 target
Today's writing
712of 500 words
Goal met43m writing
Chapter stats
Chapters25
Avg. length2,745 words
Shortest790 words
Longest5,641 words

What it shows.

Manuscript progress
Five hundred words a day is a full-length novel in a year, and the dashboard's job is to make that visible. You set the target length once, and the progress bar shows the percentage written and the words remaining, with the total drawn from every chapter in the body of the book.
This session
When you open a book, the dashboard notes the time and the word count and measures the session from there: words written, minutes elapsed, and words per minute. Forty-three minutes at that rate looks different from three hours at the desk, and after a few weeks you know what your real pace is.
Chapter breakdown
The chapter stats show the count, the average length, and the shortest and longest chapters, with a bar for every chapter in the book. In the demo manuscript the shortest is 790 words against an average of 2,745, which is either a deliberate short chapter or the place where act two needs another pass, and the breakdown tells you which chapter to open to find out.