Are you wondering how to set project goals in Scrivener? It’s not too hard! You just have to know where to look.
1. Go to Projects, then down to Show Project Targets. You can also use the shortcut Shift-Command-T.
2. Click Options at the bottom of the new window.
3. In the Draft Target tab, you can set your deadline date. When do you want your draft finished by?
4. In the Session Target tab, you have a few important options.
First, you choose when you want each ‘writing day’ to restart. If you write late at night, you might want to have your sessions restart early in the morning so all of your night writing counts for the previous day.
Next, make sure the ‘Automatically calculate from draft deadline’ box is checked.
Then choose the days you want to write. If you never plan to write on Tuesdays or Saturdays, uncheck those and it will calculate accordingly.
Push OK.
5. Now you can set your Manuscript Target by clicking on the number before ‘words’ and changing it. You can set your goal to be number of characters or pages instead of words, if you’d prefer. Just click on ‘words’.
Your deadline is now listed at the bottom of the window, along with how many days you’ve got left. If you look just above that, you can see how many words you need to write in this ‘Session’ or day to meet your goal.
6. On to some bonus tips! Look at the bottom of your document. The little paper with a check or an ‘x’ in the corner can be toggled to include the document in compile, which also counts it toward your writing goal.
7. Next to that is the bullseye. This allows you to set a goal for just this document.
8. This can be helpful if you know that you want your overall story to be, say, 50k words, but you want each chapter to be at least 2000 words. Setting a document specific goal can show you if you’re meeting your word count for that document, while also counting what you wrote in another document toward your overall word count for the day.
9. And the last thing of note is the document word count at the bottom of the page. If you click on it, you can see interesting details like average sentence length, number of paragraphs, and how long it might take someone to read this document.
