3.14 Why Word Count Goals Don't Work for PhD Writing – And What to Do Instead

In this episode, we’re diving into a common trap many PhD students and academics fall into: setting word count goals like “500 words a day” or “6,000 words by next month.” While these goals sound productive, they often oversimplify the complex process of academic writing.

I’ll explain why relying on word count as a measure of progress can hinder your motivation and overlook crucial aspects of writing, such as revising, outlining, and refining ideas. Most importantly, I’ll share smarter, more effective ways to track your progress and keep your writing on track without feeling overwhelmed.

If you’re struggling to stay motivated with your thesis, dissertation, or academic papers, this episode is here to help you rethink how you approach writing. Tune in to make meaningful progress without getting stuck in the word count trap!

Perfect for PhD students, early career researchers, and anyone navigating academic writing challenges.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends!

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Do you have a word count goal at the moment? Whether you're a PhD student or academic, do you have a notional idea? You want to have 5, 000 words written by the end of the year or a chapter finished by the end of January? I'm here, not to tell you you're wrong, because we all have those goals, right?

But to help you shape goals that are going to help you way more than simply using word counts. Now this actually came from a question from one of my members. She was talking about having a word count goal, but how some days she's doing stuff that feels important, but that doesn't progress her towards her goal. And she asked me, Vikki, should I be using word count goals? Is that the best way to do this? Cause it doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment. And as you know, I have episodes where I go through client questions, but this one was such a cracker and so important for so many of you that I decided to make a whole episode about it.

So let's start with what's wrong with word count goals. Now, before I tell you why you're wrong, it's completely understandable that you have word count goals. And actually, I think they do have a really important place. But there are a number of problems with them. The first one is it doesn't tell you anything about the quality of those words.So do you mean 6000 words of polished, virtually finished, ready to submit chapter. Or do you mean 6, 000 words of a rough first draft just so that the whole thing exists? Or do you mean something in between? We rarely specify what we actually mean. And actually at times like this, so I'm recording this the end of November, it's going out early December, often we start to kind of change what we mean.

Maybe when we first set the goal, we meant 6, 000 words of polished, finished chapter, and now we mean probably 6, 000 words of rough draft, if we're lucky. So rarely do we actually specify the quality and the number of words doesn't tell us that anyway. 

The other thing is my client recognized is that word count goals don't recognize all the different elements of writing that there are. Now I teach these in my workshop about how to write when you're struggling to write in lots of detail, but essentially we all know that there's the kind of planning phase. There's the fleshing out your plan phase. There's the turning it into a rough draft element. There's the checking structure, reorganizing things. There's the checking for flow, checking for accuracy, all of those sorts of large scale editing stuff. There's the, does it all sound nice and academic- y stage. There's the proofreading stage. And often, we don't follow that as a linear process, right? We're kind of going backwards and forwards between these chunks. And there's some of those tasks that will contribute to a word count goal. And there's some that don't. 

And so you can finish a day feeling like, well, my word count didn't change at all. Okay. Or, on some days my word count got lower, right? And unless you're really kind of conscious of what you're doing, it's hard to tell the difference between days where you were doing things that were absolutely what you should have been doing, that were appropriate to moving this piece of work forwards, It just didn't change the word count. Or days where actually you got distracted faffing about with your references or diving into articles that you were panicking that maybe you should have read but maybe you didn't need to.

If we only have word count goals it's really hard to differentiate between those things. To think what we should do instead, we need to really understand what the purpose of these goals are. Now, goals, in my view, should help you recognize progress. They should inspire action. And they should tell you when you have done what you said you were going to do. Now, I think a word count goal at a kind of macro level is a really good way of knowing whether you've done what you said you were going to do. So when we're looking at planning for a month or planning for a quarter, which is something I teach in my Be Your Own Best Boss course, then having a word count goal for those kind of large scale goals can be really, really useful.

In fact, I always argue that goals should be something you are producing, not just something that you're doing. So a goal isn't to read for your thesis, a goal is to screen these 10 papers to see whether they are worth reading in lots of detail for the chapter I'm on at the moment, for example, and to produce a list of which ones need to be scrutinized further.

Okay, so having a goal that is actually something you're producing, and a word count is absolutely something you might be producing is really, really useful at that kind of monthly and quarterly level. However, this is where it's simply not enough, and where it will rarely be the only goal you should have when we're thinking about it in a daily and weekly level.

So what I want you to think about is taking that macro goal of writing 6, 000 words in the next month or whatever. That may sound like loads or not and much depending on what stage you're at and how that process is going for you, but insert your own numbers there. 

What we now want to do is think about what interim goals, what micro goals we need that will actually reflect the different steps that are taken. And I don't suggest that for a monthly goal or a quarterly goal, you work out every single micro goal you're going to need to get from where you are now to there.

That's simply not necessary. But what you can do is think about some sort of midterm goals. So ones that, you know, where you need to be, this week, next week, in order to stay on track. So if you've got a goal in the next month of having 6, 000 words of polished draft, when do you need to have 6, 000 words of rough draft, if that doesn't exist already, for example?

So you can start breaking down that, and then you can start thinking, okay, so this week, what does that mean? And this is where we get to think about the whole myriad of goals that we could set that would actually reflect the tasks we need to do. So instead of saying, right, if I'm going to get 6, 000 words by the end of this month, then I need to be doing, what's that, do the maths quickly, 200 words a day in order to do that.

Well, that doesn't allow for planning. That doesn't allow for redrafting, restructuring, shortening, polishing, editing, all that stuff. But instead we can say, okay, if I want to get to 6, 000 words polished draft by the end of this month, I want to get to 6, 000 words of rough draft by two weeks time, what do I need to do to get to that rough draft?

Well, one goal might be to produce an approximate outline of what the major sections need to be. One goal might be to turn one of those sections into a more detailed paragraph plan. One. My goal might be to put bullet points into each of my paragraph plans to show what roughly needs to be covered in that paragraph.

A goal might be to produce 200 words around that paragraph plan to flesh it out into a rough draft. Okay? And there's so many good things that happen when you break down the work like this and you have goals that are much more specific to what you have to do. 

Firstly, it recognizes all these different sorts of work that you need to do. You might, for example, decide that in order to produce 6, 000 words of polished draft, you need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft. I always recommend overwriting at the rough draft stage. It's a little bit like, I always used to tell my students, it's like if you're trying to produce a good pasta sauce, right? You don't start with the volume that you want your sauce to end up being. You start by making something that's bigger than that, yeah, that's got more juice in it than that. And then you slowly simmer it and the rubbish bits steam off so the water disappears and you end up with a really lovely concentrated pasta sauce by the end of it.

And the same is true with writing, so you may decide actually I need to produce 8, 000 words of rough draft and then actually part of my goal for that later period is to take this section of two pages and bring it down to one page, or bring it down to a page and a half by taking out repetition, by taking out unnecessary sentences, by changing my sentence structure to make it more elegant and efficient.

And then actually on those days, your goal is to go from having 800 words to having 600 words, for example. Okay? So, giving yourself a much wider range of types of goals, especially these micro goals, can enable you to recognise the different things there are to do when you're writing, get much more specific about what your tasks are, and to also then recognise progress.

Because progress is doing what you intended. Progress doesn't have to be generating new words. Progress can be completing the tasks you said you were going to do on that day. I talk about this a little bit. I have an episode about how to break your work down into chunks. And it goes through why you might find that challenging, and why it can be super beneficial. But this is an example of how you can do it when you're writing.

Setting these interim goals, these micro goals that are more specific than just producing wordcount can also help you to finish a day and know exactly what you did. There's nothing worse than that feeling that you did a load of work and you're not really sure what you did and your work counts no bigger than it was.

So it enables you to finish a day going, yeah, I plan to take that from 600 or I plan to write three bullet points under each section, or whatever it was, and look. there it is, check me out doing exactly what I intended. So it can allow you to reinforce when you did do what you planned. 

It also makes it way easier to decide what you're going to do tomorrow to actually go, okay, that's my job. Let's crack on because you're not having to kind of go, well, 200 words Goal, because that's what I said I'd need to do every day to generate my 6, 000 words, but really I feel like I probably should edit what I've done already, but then I won't generate that. It enables you to go, Okay, that's my goal. Do my goal. Boom. Did my goal. Check me out. 

And then it becomes this kind of self fulfilling thing where you become someone who plans what you're doing, does what you planned, and then rewards yourself for it. So that's why word count goals are crucial. We've got to produce work, but they are not sufficient.

They are necessary, but not sufficient. And hopefully in this pretty short episode, you can see the benefits of having a far wider variety of goals than that. Let me know what you think. What sorts of goals do you set yourself when it comes to your writing? How do you know that you're making progress? And how do you know that you've done the things that you intended. Today is quite short because it's the 9th of December that this is going out. Americans, you'll be coming off the wave of your Thanksgiving. Anyone who celebrates Christmas will be building towards that, and most universities will be having a winter break for all the different festivals that are happening at the moment.

You're busy, you've got lots going. I want you to just Pause listening now. Go double check your to do lists. Have you got word count goals? Have you got other sorts of goals? How can you make sure that your goals are realistic, the things you want to get done before that winter break, and so that they're actually recognizing the tasks that you're doing to move yourself in that direction?

Use this extra time to go check your goals and tweak them so that we can really recognise all the work that we do between now and the winter holidays. If you didn't sign up for my membership, by the way, it's okay. I want you to love on that decision. But if you were telling yourself that, you know, maybe in the new year, don't need it right now, but maybe in the new year, I want you to go to my website and jump yourself onto my waiting list. It doesn't commit you to anything at all, but it does mean you get all the information about when the doors will open, what's coming up in that month, and give you the opportunity to answer any questions.

So by putting yourself on the waiting list, it doesn't mean that you're definitely in, but it does mean that you'll get the information that you need if you're telling yourself that you might join in January or February. So make sure you are on that list.

Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Let me know how you set your goals, whether you use word counts or some other mission, and maybe I'll share some of your expertise in future episodes. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next week.

Thank you for listening to the PhD Life Coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.

com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.