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.
I myself would like to offer my thoughts. As a pantser, I have multiple ways of crafting individual posts. Sometimes it just flows straight out the mind, and other times it’s a matter of teasing extra words out of individual headers. I’ve typed on my phone and my laptop, and I’ve also written longhand, and it’s all for the same work—blog posts or novel manuscripts.
Either way, I hope you find your workflow flow!