Word Goal Tracker
Set a target for a chapter, essay, or dissertation, paste or type your draft, and watch the progress bar fill. Shows words remaining, percentage complete, and how many sessions at your current pace remain.
How Word Goal Tracker works
Set the word count you are aiming for.
Write or paste your current draft.
Track words remaining and percentage complete.
Log the session to build a history of your pace.
When to use Word Goal Tracker
- Working a single draft — a chapter, an essay, a dissertation section — toward a fixed word count.
- Writing or pasting your current text and watching the progress bar fill as the live word count climbs.
- Reading how many words remain, or how many you are over, the moment you pass the target.
- Logging finished sessions to build a record of your pace and an estimate of how many sittings are left.
- Driving a NaNoWriMo push or a thesis chapter where the target is what matters, not the calendar date.
- Checking, before you commit to a deadline, roughly how many more sessions at your usual pace the goal will take.
Examples
Input
Draft currently 1,300 words, target 2,000.
Output
65% · 1,300 / 2,000 · 700 words remaining.
The bar caps at 100%. Once you pass the target the second tile flips from “Remaining” to “Over target” and shows the overflow instead.
Input
700 words remaining; logged sessions of 400 and 600 words.
Output
Average 500 words per session — about 2 more to hit the target.
Remaining words divided by your average logged session, rounded up: ceil(700 / 500) = 2. With no sessions logged yet there is no average, so no estimate appears.
Input
Draft at 2,150 words against a 2,000 target.
Output
100% · the bar switches to its completion colour · the tile reads “Over target 150”.
How Word Goal Tracker works under the hood
The word count comes from NeatKit’s shared counting rule: text is split on whitespace, so a hyphenated compound like “state-of-the-art” and a contraction like “don’t” each count as one word — the same behaviour as the Word Counter, so the two tools always agree. The count updates on every keystroke, which is what moves the progress bar and the remaining figure as you write.
Progress is the live word count divided by the target, clamped to 100 so the bar never overflows. The remaining figure is the target minus the count, floored at zero. The moment the count meets or beats the target, the bar colour shifts to signal completion and the “Remaining” tile becomes “Over target”, showing how many words past the goal you have written — useful when you plan to overshoot and trim later.
Logging a session captures the current word count as a single timestamped entry at the top of the history; the most recent 50 are kept and older ones fall off. It records the size of the draft at that moment, not the words added since the last log, so the figure is a snapshot rather than a delta. Logging is disabled when the draft is empty.
The sessions-remaining estimate divides the words you still have left by the mean of your logged sessions and rounds up. Because it uses your own logged average, it sharpens as you record more sittings, and it is hidden entirely until at least one session exists or once you have reached the target. Only the target and the session history are saved — the draft itself is never written to storage.
Common mistakes
- Expecting the pasted draft to be there next time. The text lives only in the page and is gone when you leave; it is never saved. Only your target and logged sessions persist.
- Reading a logged session as “words added”. Each log stores the draft’s total word count at that instant, so logging twice without writing anything records the same number twice, not a gain of zero.
- Trusting the sessions-remaining estimate too early. It is built from the average of your logged sittings, so with one or two logs it is noisy; it steadies as the history grows.
- Assuming target and history follow you across devices. They live in this browser’s local storage with no account or sync, so a different browser or machine starts fresh, and clearing site data resets both.