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Does anyone have a good system for prioritising publishing drafts?

by William Howard
6th Jun 2025
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Does anyone have a good system for prioritising publishing drafts?
3MichaelDickens
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MichaelDickens

Jun 06, 2025

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I have a lot of drafts that are currently written as bullet-point outlines. They contain essentially all relevant information, and arguably I could publish them as-is, but I don't know how comprehensible they will be, so I want to fill in the details.

There are two low-effort solutions:

  1. Publish the bullet point outline.
    • Downside: Maybe it only makes sense in my head and nobody will know what I'm trying to say.
    • Downside: I have no filter when I write outlines. Sometimes my outline says something like "idea X is stupid", and the thing I end up publishing is "A carefully reasoned critical analysis of idea X (credence: 90%)" (I try to be explicit about what I believe, but that doesn't mean I have to be rude about it)
    • Downside: Posting bullet point outlines feels low-status or something idk.
  2. Feed it into an LLM and ask it to write a full post.
    • Downside: LLMs are considerably worse at writing than I am (as of June 2025...we'll see where we're at next month).
    • I've tried doing this in the past and I disliked the results, although I think it would be possible to get better results if I knew how to prompt the LLM into writing in a better style.

I could publish more posts if there were a good and easy way to convert outlines into posts.

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I've been thinking about ways to optimise the EA Forum to increase the likelihood that ideas go from peoples' heads to being published in some form (relevant). My general idea is like this:

  1. Make it an easy default action to start writing out an idea and save it as a draft.
  2. Nudge people to finish and post these drafts.

On (2), I think it would be good if we could recommend a system to people to get drafts over the line, but I have never successfully followed any such system myself.

Does anyone have a process you follow that reliably results in publishing things from your draft pile?

Example systems for illustration:

Example 1

  1. Look at your list of drafts, and rank the most promising ones by:
    1. How quick it would be to parcel out any publishable idea and post it.
    2. How valuable this idea is.
    3. How excited you are about writing this.
    4. Whether this is part of a fruitful conversation.
  2. Optimise heavily for (a) and (d), subject to (c) it being just about bearable to write. Use (b) to break ties.

Example 2

Pay 5 people to stand behind you and make you write.

[Crossposted from the EA Forum]