Calculate Days Needed To Reach A Gold Goal

Today's guest post was written by long-time livestream viewer Zackiz.

Almost a year ago when I started to make gold in World of Warcraft as a meta-game I was disorganized. I felt I needed some sort of spreadsheet to keep an overview of my income progress so I threw something fast together and it was a mess.

Over time I changed it and and made it better. The other day it hit me, maybe there are more folks out there who may want it to use something like this. It has helped me keep my aim straight and kept my morale up when times have been tough. It has even given me some motivation to find more ways to push the income up when it was worth it. Read on past the jump for more.

I usually watch Jim’s livestream so I sent it to him. He liked it and asked me to write up some kind of documentation and here it is.

The spreadsheet needs to be either downloaded (for use in Excel or OpenOffice) or copied (for use in Google Drive) from the File menu in order to be edited/used.

The spreadsheet is on Google Drive here: Income Days Numbered.

So, lets get started.

The Base

B1: Fill in your current goal here, in gold. It can be your overall goal or maybe a milestone you want to reach.
B2: Fill in your current total gold amount here.
B3: This is the calculated amount of gold you have left to reach your goal. This is the number used as a base for most of the spreadsheet.

The Meat

What you see next is 4 column-groups, Left-Avg Income. There are at the moment 160 days but this can be extended if you want more by using copy/paste.

The “Left” column represents the number of days left until you reach your goal. The reason I just didn't type “Days Left” is looks and space. You can change it in your copy if you want.

The “Avg Income” column represents the average income you need to earn during the corresponding number of days to reach your goal.

As an example, the red marked area in the picture below represents if your average income per day is 3049g, then it will take you 82 days to reach your goal assuming you keep the same pace.




If you are using TSM (which you should) you can see your average income for the last 7 days, 30 days and all your recorded data. Which of these you should use is up to you. I like to use the 7 days one since that one adapts faster to variations in your income. If you use the 30 days one, you will get a “smoother” number.




As you might have seen by now the 160 days not only split up into 4 column-groups, it also continues down under the first column. This is the same data as the one we have use so far but this is used for the graph on the side, which leads into....

The Graph

This graph is a visual representation of the spreadsheet. It is basically just an additional way of looking at the situation. It shows how harsh the diminishing returns are when you are trying to lessen the number of days you need, in order to reach your goal.

The X-axis is the number of days left and the Y-axis is the average income per day needed to reach you goal. As you can see, the closer in days you get to your goal, the more you need to increase your average income to cut of another day.

And that is basically it. I hope this sheet will help motivating you in your gold-making. It certainly has for me.

//Zackiz

I want to thank Zackiz for taking the time to give us more details on this spreadsheet. It really is an awesome tool. 

I was able to plug in my own goal and average daily income. If I stay on track income-wise I could reach my current gold-making goal in about 16 days. Neat!

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