Why a daily target?
6 May 2026
Graham Greene wrote five hundred words a day, and would stop when he reached that number, even if it was halfway through a sentence. It meant that the next morning he knew exactly where to pick up.
We built Waxcap™ around the same idea. You set a daily word target, Waxcap keeps count as you write, and it shows you each day whether you got there.
Why 500 words
If you write 500 words a day, an 80,000-word novel would take 160 writing days.
It's an amount that can usually fit around a working day, without needing a free weekend or a week off, which is why we made it the default. If it doesn't suit you, set your own target in Settings ▸ General. It covers everything you write that day, across all your projects.
Rest days
Your streak is the number of days in a row you've met your target. Miss it on an ordinary day and the streak goes back to zero.
Rest days are the days of the week you don't plan to write. Maybe you take weekends off, or Wednesdays are always taken up with something else. Pick them in the same settings and your streak carries on through them. If you meet your target on a rest day anyway, it adds a day.
Hiding the numbers
If you'd rather write without the numbers in view, turn on Hide Statistics in Settings ▸ General. The Stats panel and the daily count are hidden from view. Waxcap keeps counting in the background, so when you turn the numbers back on, your streaks and records are all still there.