The Pipeline (again) or “Am I really working on Sunday?”

This post will appear on the 15th of January, 04:00am, Adelaide, South Australia daylight saving timezone. Does this mean that I am up at that hour or working on a Sunday morning? Far from it! I’m writing this post on Friday afternoon, as my day winds down.

After I wrote my post on the pipeline, I realised that my commitment to a daily blogging schedule had created a 15-30 minute hole in each of my days and sometimes I don’t have that much time to spare. We’ve all had the days when, after thinking about it for 6 hours, you finally take a well-earned bathroom break. If those 5 minutes are hard to scavenge, where would I get the headspace to write something amusing and amazing on a day like that?

Re-enter the pipeline! I am now working at least a day in advance. This has two advantages, firstly, that I take the pressure off myself and, secondly, that I can adjust my posting times to maximise the chances of being picked up and read from the Education topics page. I’m not writing this for my own benefit (well, not exclusively) – I want this to be read. By having my posts ready a day in advance I can commit them for publication at a time when more potential readers are awake!

Australia is a beautiful place but it’s a long way from anywhere and a large portion of the English-speaking education community are asleep when I’m awake. If you flick on topics/Education at 9:00am every day in San Francisco – I should be in bed because it’s about 3:30am where I am. So I’m experimenting with a 4am posting time to try and catch a sweet spot for the US being awake and the UK not yet being asleep. I wouldn’t be able to do this with live update, or without a pipeline, unless I was wishing to sometimes skip a day’s post to move it into the next hot zone.

I have jumped around a bit in scheduled publication time. I’m reviewing results this weekend* to see which has been the ‘most successful’ viewing time and I’ll start using that as my default publication time. I don’t care how many people ‘follow’ or ‘like’ my posts – but I do care if nobody reads what I’m writing because that means I’m wasting my time.

You can probably tell that I’m not all that keen on wasting my time. Yes, this requires both forethought and discipline but I am finding it incredibly liberating to know that all I have to do between now and Monday is think of one cool thing and put that in the pipeline too. Hmm. I have 5 minutes left…

(*PSST: Measurement is the Key to Everything)