Here’s an interesting thought. Im working myself up to write a book of about 70,000 words. Right now that seems a silly amount get through and I find myself procrastinating rather a lot.
So as a motivational tool I figured out how much I write online… it’s a fun exercise.
Since 2005 I’ve hung out on several places, this is a rough (conservative [1]) estimate of the amount written:
- Forum One: 7,000 posts, around 30 words a post = 120,000
- Forum Two: 3,000 posts, around 40 words a post = 120,000
- Hacker News: 2,436 comments, conservatively around 50 words per comment = 121800
- Blog(s): somewhere in the region of 90 posts, about 500 words each = 45000
It’s about 400,000 words over 5 years, most of those in the last 3. About 219 words per day.
So that means at this rate it should only take a year to write my book. Maybe not the positive feeling I was aiming for. 
1. I feel this is really conservative, my “best guess” figure puts it at nearly 750,000+
hehe.
I have 80,000 to write for my thesis and just about 2 years to do it in
At least that gives me an idea of how many words I should be writing a day towards it! In fact more as I’ll have to make corrections!