The Power of a Pipeline

If you have been following along this year, the theme of all blog-related work is to reduce the friction in the writing process. If not, check out this to get caught up. Some of the friction experienced in the past is keeping up with the pace of a post a week. On paper, it was easy. Getting ideas into readable content that others could relate to takes work. The self-imposed deadline for this weekly post did not allow me to take the time to construct the content. Many posts were released to meet the schedule rather than the quality of work I wanted. Here in lies the friction.

Now at this midpoint in the year, previously discussed changes in this blog have allowed me to build a pipeline of posts. I needed help understanding the value of the stocked pipe of content and the value of creating a sequence of posts scheduled for the future. Putting in that work to generate two additional future posts came at a cost. The investment has opened the doors to other creative freedom. When writing this post, four pieces of content are staged for future release, with a post going live earlier this morning. That is ten weeks of content in the schedule. I will feel free to generate less content in these ten weeks. I can focus on other learnings that will be used as a basis for more content.

This pipeline of content took a couple of weeks to put together. My approach was first to get the immediate schedule satisfied. Then do the work to allow posts to automatically release. My goal was to generate an additional piece of content within the next desired post date. Beating that goal quickly, it took commitment to frequently writing to build out the remaining content schedule. Each piece of written content allowed for the flexible time between content pieces. It led to more learning and experimenting.

I am excited about what is to come with this newfound freedom. I have a couple of other experiments to make this easier for management, as always continuing to learn better ways and new technologies to solve these problems.