Continuing my retrospective:
During the work week, I always wrote in the evening. Mornings for Saturdays, and Sundays were a crapshoot, with me writing anywhere in the day (but usually not first thing in the morning). Looking back, I felt better about most of my Saturday writing, but maybe that was because I wasn't under a time crunch, nor did I constrain myself as much for word-count (due to not having the time crunch).
Because of that, I'd expected my Saturday pieces in particular to be both longer and better, and somewhat for Sunday as well. However, when I choose my current favorite stories (detailed later), only only half of them were written during the weekend. That's a higher output per number of days, but less than I had expected. Also, my two favorites (so far) were written on a worknight.
Word count also tells an interesting tale. It turns out that Thursday nights were my best for number of words, with an average of 1956. That was followed closely by Saturday with 1839, then Sunday (1645), Wednesday (1635), Friday (1549), Tuesday (1512), and finally Monday (1477). Obviously some variability, but I showed I can regularly crunch out an average of over 1650 words a day for a month when writing shorter pieces, which is just a hair less than a winning NaNoWriMo pace.
Continuing to look at word counts, my longest (fully completed) story was 3693 words, on the first day. My shortest was on the fourth day, with 771. (Neither what I expected when I started reviewing, though I knew both were in the mix). On only three days did I have less than 1k words for a story.
The reason I mentioned (fully completed) above was that three times, in the middle of the story, I decided that it was going too long and that I had to resort to summarizing the rest of the story in order to get to an "ending". Currently, those sit at 2494 words, 2725 words, and 1409 words. By the last one, I obviously decided faster that I had to summarize. I'll declare that an improvement for this month's exercise, calling it better knowledge of the short story effort, rather than me being lazier. It might have been both.
The big thing that I've found when trying to do something similar is that I do best when I focus on smaller word counts spread across the day. If I can get 700 before work and 700 over lunch, getting to 2000 for the day (or beyond) is very doable in the evening. And I've found that a week later, I can't remember when I wrote any given passage.
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