Writing Goals & Sessions

Writing goals keep you accountable: set a target, write, and watch the progress bar fill. Scriptorium tracks your output automatically — no manual logging.

Creating a goal

Open Goals in the Tools panel and create a goal:

Goal type:
- Daily words — write n words each day
- Total words — reach a cumulative word count (e.g. 80,000 for the draft)
Scope — link the goal to specific manuscripts. Link a parent (say, the whole Manuscript folder or an Act) and everything inside it counts automatically.
Start date, and an optional end date (deadline).
Days off — exclude specific dates from a daily goal, guilt-free.

How progress is tracked

Every time a manuscript saves (which happens continuously as you type), Scriptorium records the words added and deleted for that manuscript that day.
Deleting text never counts against you — a heavy revision day where you cut 500 words and wrote 300 counts as 300 words written.
Progress shows as a bar with a percentage, and you get a notification the moment you first hit a goal.

See how words are counted below.

Goal history

Each goal has an expandable history: a day-by-day calendar showing which days you hit the target, missed it, or are still ongoing. Perfect for keeping a streak honest.

What counts as a word

Word counts include your prose — paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, list items, links, and tables — and exclude footnotes, images, and code blocks. The toolbar count for a manuscript includes all its nested children.