My system has been writing on its own since August: the workshop and factory notebooks get drafted on Sundays without me, and the book’s chapters come out of interviews I direct. Writing stopped being the problem a while ago.
On Thursday September 3rd the list of drafts waiting for my go-ahead stood at fourteen pieces, and twelve had been there over a week. Nothing had been published in the book since August 19th.
The whole list was one click away on the drafts panel, so in theory there was no excuse. In practice I never gave that click, because a link to fourteen things doesn’t get opened: it gets postponed.
There was another leak hiding behind it. My notes on the drafts (I jot them from my phone, tapping the paragraph I want to adjust) fell into a mailbox I never saw move. I didn’t know whether an adjustment of mine had been applied, unless I went back and opened the draft to check.
The fix wasn’t asking myself for discipline. It was changing the size of what reaches me: every night at 21:30 a single piece comes in over Telegram, the one that has waited longest, with two links to read it and publish it in one tap.
Three rules so it doesn’t get tiresome. The same piece doesn’t repeat until seven days have passed. A piece with unapplied notes of mine isn’t offered for publishing, since I already said what had to change. And if no piece qualifies, that night there is no message.
The notes now answer back too: when an adjustment of mine gets applied, I receive the text of my own note with the link to the rewritten draft.
What happened in two nights
The first night the message offered a workshop piece. That one is still waiting. But that same night I tried to publish chapter 4 and the button died without a word: the panel’s gate session had expired and the failure ended in an unreadable error.
A door nobody walks through doesn’t warn you it’s broken either: in two weeks without publishing, nobody had set foot on it. Out of that attempt came the fix (publishing is now a normal navigation that survives the expired gate) and the chapter was out before midnight.
The second night it was chapter 3’s turn. The message named it at half past nine, by 22:37 it was published, and once rolling I kept going: two workshop pieces and chapter 5 before midnight.
In two nights five pieces went out. We were coming from two weeks at zero.
What changes from today
Whatever is pending my decision no longer waits for me in a list: it comes looking for me, one piece at a time and at an hour when I can actually look at it. The bottleneck was my attention, and you don’t ask attention for fourteen things, you ask it for one.
The queue, mind you, hasn’t gone down: it still stands at fourteen, since the factory wrote as many again that same week. What changed is that before it only grew, and now it also drains.
Technical detail: bin/una-al-dia.js + una-al-dia.timer (21:30, picks from bin/pendientes.sh --json, memory in .una-al-dia.json, test 20/20) · applied-note alert in bin/nota.js hecha (test 18/18, 03/09) · publishing as navigation GET /publicar/hacer on the Deck (test 24/24, 04/09) · timeline: una-al-dia.service journal (04/09 21:30 taller:la-piscina-de-casa, 05/09 21:30 capitulo:03-volver-a-crear) and the Deck’s journal (05/09 22:37 chapter 3, 22:51 and 23:57 workshop, 23:54 chapter 5; 04/09 23:41 chapter 4 in the logbook).