Feature release: Writing Goals (Inspired by "Morning pages")

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron asks for morning pages: three pages of longhand, first thing, every day. The pages are not meant to be good. They are not meant to be read back. Cameron is explicit that quality is not the point, and that judging what comes out defeats the exercise. The only thing being asked of you is that you turn up at the page.

Goals is built on that idea, so it tracks two streaks rather than one.

Two streaks

• Showed up counts every consecutive day you wrote anything at all. One line counts. A scene heading you deleted an hour later counts.
• Daily goal counts the consecutive days you hit the word target you set for yourself.

Both are shown, but they are not equal. The goal streak measures output on a day you already had. The showed-up streak measures the habit that produces the days in the first place. On a week where the writing is bad, the second number is the one still telling you something true.

The day is not over yet

One deliberate detail: a streak does not break the moment you open the app on a day you have not written yet. If today is still empty, the streak counts from yesterday and stays alive. It only ends when a day passes with nothing in it. A habit tracker that shows you a zero at nine in the morning is punishing you for the day not being over, and that is a strange thing to do to someone you want to keep writing.

Set a goal you will actually hit

The daily word target is yours to set, and it is worth setting it low enough that a bad day still clears it. Cameron's three pages is roughly 750 words, which is a reasonable place to start, but a target you meet on a tired Tuesday is worth more than one you meet twice a month. You can turn the target off entirely and track only whether you showed up.

The Friday note

If you want it, there is an optional weekly email on Fridays with your two streaks and the words you wrote that week. It is off unless you ask for it, and it is a summary rather than a nudge: no guilt, no missing-you copy, just the count.

Open it from Goals in the left sidebar.