I don’t know if I am an outlier, but it has taken me a long time to realize the value there is in developing personal workflow routines. Ideas about how you do something – write an article, draft a blog post or an issue of a newsletter or even start and finish a book.
I have always seen the debate between outliners and pantsers in writing as a largely personal style issue, but there may be more to it. The outliners may actually have an argument not for outlines as much as for routine workflows – and the pantsers simply have another routine (sit down, write, rewrite and go from there). Both are workflows with rigor and robustness — they are just different.
An idea that occurred to me today was that it may be interesting to document and reshape some of the workflows that I have developed “naively” over time and see if that can improve my output. I am currently not happy with my production function, as Tyler Cowen would put it, and need to figure out ways to do things better, and more routinely.
One is writing a blog in English, so here goes.