Part of Ultraworking’s work cycles process involves defining a plan at the start of a work session and then making regular pace checks to see whether there’s anything you need to adjust in order to hit your goal. One of the adjustments that often comes up is asking whether it would make sense to “re-scope”. This just means adjusting the scope of your goal for the session.

I’ve been writing about my writing process, breaking it down into steps in order to think about the parts separately. This process of breaking the work down into discrete steps is helpful in other contexts as well. I benefited a lot from doing a similar thing with music while I was working on the Nosferatu soundtrack. The steps were different, but the principle of creating a repeatable process got me through the project with a lot less pain than I would have had without that structure.

The final step of the writing pipeline model that I’ve been describing is publishing. It seems like this should be relatively straightforward, right? It’s just a matter of formatting the thing and hitting publish. But actually I think there can be some significant barriers here that are worth thinking through.

The process of drafting and editing is one that I’m more confident about than other steps in the writing process. I don’t have any doubts that if I have ideas then I can get them down and put them into a presentable (though rarely beautiful) shape. In terms of thinking about the multiplicative pipeline model, the biggest challenges for me are the effort and morale issues involved in producing writing. This is what I know about reliably making that process easier, but there’s still a large cost here. If I could reduce that cost further then I reckon it would increase the amount of written work that I could produce.

There are two problems here which I had originally grouped into one step, but which are actually probably quite separate: firstly organising ideas that have occurred to you, and secondly identifying which of those ideas are things that you’d like to publish.