{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Chris Krycho - math","link":"http:\/\/v4.chriskrycho.com\/","description":{},"lastBuildDate":"Tue, 12 Nov 2019 20:30:00 -0500","item":{"title":"A Silly Spreadsheet Mistake","link":"http:\/\/v4.chriskrycho.com\/2019\/a-silly-spreadsheet-mistake.html","description":"

Assumed Audience<\/a>:<\/b> people who find nerdy mistakes amusing\u2014especially my wife, who rolls her eyes at all my shenanigans of this variety.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Offered for your amusement, reader:<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve been working on my November writing goal<\/a>, I set up a spreadsheet to track it\u2014being a good nerd and all.<\/p>\n

I was confused because while I had estimated that 500 words\/day would see me hit 15,000 words, and I had been averaging a bit north of 800 words per day, my spreadsheet kept showing the expected final count going down<\/em>\u2026 from ~17,000 a few days ago when I looked it up for the latest issue of my newsletter<\/a>, to ~16,000 when I looked at it after today\u2019s time working on an essay.<\/p>\n

I stared at the math in the spreadsheet for a minute tonight, before it finally hit me: I had gotten fancy with the calculation, pulling in the number of days remaining and multiplying that times the average so far\u2026 but not including what I\u2019d already written. It turns out that the only way I could hit my goal following this<\/em> math would be exponentially increasing my output until the on final day I was averaging<\/em> 15,000 words per day. (15,000 words\/day \u00d7 1 day = 15,000 words.)<\/p>\n

The correct<\/em> math is, uhh, \u201cMultiply the average per day by 30. Done.\u201d<\/p>\n

The postscript, of course, is more nerdery: I redefined my expected output to use that simple math\u2026 but then also added a column so I could see what my expected total would be if I took the words I\u2019ve written up through today and then only wrote 500 words each day remaining: the minimum<\/em> I can expect to hit if I stay on track. You can\u2019t stop the nerdery.<\/p>\n","pubDate":"Tue, 12 Nov 2019 20:30:00 -0500","guid":"tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-12:\/2019\/a-silly-spreadsheet-mistake.html","category":["humor","math","writing"]}}}