All the Stats You Can Shake a Stick At

I ran some analysis on my poem writing habits for the last year by looking at Created timestamps for one folder in iA Writer.

This represents only poems I think are at least okay and have been revised at least once after a cool-down period of at least a day. Those are the requirements for poems to graduate from my work folder into the normal free-verse folder.

I should clarify: poems that are “okay” doesn’t always mean poems I will show to the world. Many are experiments I found interesting, like the poem I wrote that uses an increasing Levenshtein distance between words. I like to keep them in this folder so my eye runs across them when browsing, but they’re basically drawer poems.

A few things jumped out here.

• You can see Day of Week is pretty flat, I write any day of the week.
• Peaks at 10am, 4-5pm, then 10pm. This tracks since it’s 10:17pm now.
• I wrote nothing in March 2026. This is misleading. I wrote a few bad things that month and I wrote some haiku. But I did take a break, I went on vacation, and I did a ton of revisions.
• I migrated from Ulysses to iA Writer in August 2025. I excluded all those data points because they dwarfed everything.
• I write a bit at work. For whatever reason, I write more humor during the work day. I have iA Writer on my phone and it’s a real problem.

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Aforementioned Levenshtein poem.

Levenshtein Climbs the Ladder and Sounds the Alarm

hear hear
    loose goose
         may try
                 eating boring
                     beef guts
                         Hence, alarm.