Where is my history kept?

In this browser's local storage, capped at the last fourteen days. Nothing is sent anywhere, and clearing site data removes it.

Why does the pace start blank?

The pace is measured from the moment your session started, so it needs a little elapsed time before a rate is meaningful. The restart button resets that measurement deliberately.

Does the goal reset at midnight?

Progress is tracked against the day, and history entries are keyed to your local calendar date, so a new day begins with the current draft count as that day's starting point.

Can I use it to track a book-length project?

The history keeps fourteen days, which suits a daily habit rather than a year-long chart. Copy the summaries into a spreadsheet if you want a full project record.

What counts as a word here?

The same segments the site's Unicode-aware tokenizer counts everywhere: numbers count, hyphenated compounds count once, and apostrophes stay inside the word.

Writing Goal Tracker

Today’s goal

Daily word goale.g. 500

Your draft, goal and history stay in this browser. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

Progress

Write in the box below — progress, pace and history update as you type.

Your draft

Today’s writing

Set a daily word goal, watch a measured pace and a projected finish time, and keep a short local history of the last two weeks — all stored in this browser, never uploaded.

What is Writing Goal Tracker?

A daily word goal is the most effective target most writers use, and the hardest to keep honest without a number to look at. The Writing Goal Tracker shows words written against the target, the remaining count, your measured pace and a projected finish time, and it records how the last fortnight went. It is a writing goal tracker, not a coach: it reports what happened and leaves the judgement to you.

The pace figure is measured rather than assumed. The tool notes when your session began — the first time the draft box has content in it — and divides the words in the draft by the minutes since then. That means a pace of six hundred words an hour is a statement about this session, not a generic average from a writing advice article. The projected finish time is the remaining words divided by that same pace, so a slow start or a break moves it honestly. There is a button to restart the pace measurement if you want to begin a fresh session without clearing the draft.

Progress is shown three ways: a headline count with the percentage of the goal, a progress bar, and the remaining word count. When the count passes the target, a notice confirms the goal for the day rather than simply stopping. The results box also states the goal itself, so a screenshot or a copied summary always carries the target it was measured against.

The history strip records the highest word count the draft reached on each local calendar day, and shows the last seven. Because the day boundary is taken from your own clock, the entry rolls over at local midnight rather than at a server's idea of midnight, and the stored history is capped at fourteen days. Two limits are stated rather than hidden: the figure is the count in this browser's draft box, so writing elsewhere is not included, and clearing your browser's site data removes the history along with the draft.

Everything is local. The draft autosaves a moment after you stop typing, the goal and the history are kept in the same browser storage, and there is no account, no sync and no upload. Word counting uses the site's Unicode-aware tokenizer, so hyphenated compounds, apostrophes and punctuation behave the way a word processor would treat them. Download gives you the draft as a plain text file, and the copy button produces a summary with the goal, the count, the percentage, the remainder and the measured pace.

The honest caveat is the important one: a word count goal measures output, and output is a leading indicator of progress rather than progress itself. Use it to make writing happen daily, not to decide whether a chapter is finished.

A few small habits make the tracker worth returning to. Decide the goal before the session rather than after it, write in the box rather than in another window, and let the history accumulate instead of resetting it; a fortnight of entries shows which days of the week actually produce words and which are habitually lost. Because everything stays in this browser, the record is a private log rather than a public streak, and nobody has to see a bad Tuesday.

How to use Writing Goal Tracker

Enter a realistic daily goal, in words. Five hundred is a fair starting point for a first session.
Write in the draft box below. Every count on the page updates as you type.
Watch the remaining figure and the projected finish time, which are based on your measured pace.
Use the restart button when you return after a long break so the pace reflects the new session.
Copy the summary or download the draft; the history updates automatically as the day's count grows.

When to use Writing Goal Tracker vs related tools

Use it for a sustained project — a novel, a thesis, a daily publishing habit — where the target is a number of words per day. The Writing Sprint Timer fits the opposite situation: a single focused block where the clock, not the daily total, is the constraint.

When you want the count to match what a publisher or a submission form expects, the Word Count Tool reports the same number with sentences, paragraphs and reading time beside it.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.