Scrivener lets you do some lovely things around word count, seting targets and time frames and letting Scrivener keep track of where you’ve got to.

You’ll find this in Projects / Show Project Targets. When you open this you’ll get this window. This shows any Target that you’ve set for your entire project and also your Session target, which is effectively today’s Target. You can edit these targets just by clicking in the target fields and editing the number there. You can also set Character or Page targets if that’s how you roll.

 

This is the window that you’ll use to keep track of your Session and Project progress. You can keep it open or open it when you want to check how things are going. But you can set a bunch of other things around Targets.

Click on Options to open the settings window.

Draft Target

You can set to count only what’s in your Complie set or current compile group. I’d recommed leaving this as it is for now.

Deadline

If you are working to a deadline, or maybe you’re doing NaNoWriMo, or you just want to give yourself something to work towards, you can set a Deadline for your Target. If you check this and add a date then your Session Target will be adjusted to allow for this.

Session Target

The two interesting settings here are Automatically reset at midnight, which will reset your Session target each night, giving you a fresh run at your daily target the next day. If you don’t check this, then your daily Session target will still be counting the next day, which is efficient but can be a bit disheartening.

Automatically calculate from draft deadline. This assumes you’ve set a Deadline, and will then track how many days you have remaining to your deadline. I find this an incredibly powerful motivator as it allows me to keep an eye on where I’ve got to without working out my word count per day and calculating backwards. An added refinement is that you can tell Scrivener days you don’t write on, e.g. Sunday, and it will allow you a day off and calculate accordingly.