prodissues

Another Change To My Writing Workflow

Fri 07 October 2016 by yaniv

Till not long ago kept all my drafts in one big posts' drafts. It was a good way to log things I've learned, while preparing to share those learnings in this blog. Keep this huge file public, meant to encourage me to iterate on drafts and eventually turn them into posts.

In an earlier post I mentioned that this strategy didn't work very well, as this draft file turned into a draft cemetery - whatever got into it, didn't come out. I, therefore, changed my workflow, and implemented the WordPress scheduling feature. I found that writing a first draft, and setting a publish date 2 days or so into the future, is much more effective in keeping me focused finishing up posts, and eventually help me write more.

The only thing is that I need to write those drafts somewhere, and I still want those drafts to be online. Instead of going back to my old single draft file, I figured I can start drafts in separate files, categorize them as drafts and publish them into the future. But I don't want those drafts to show on the main page, so I installed the "Ultimate Category Excluder", which let me exclude posts from certain categories to show up in the homepage.

Update: This "hiding category" solution won't work... to begin with, even if I hide a category, when publishing a draft post, subscribers get a notification that there's a new post on my blog. I don't want that to happen. Second, the whole scheduling thing doesn't work anymore, because the post is already live when I post it as draft... so no motivation to go back to it, more than do it when it's part of a larger file...