At the top of my content plan for October there is a list. It says what is already live on the NexBDM blog, so that nothing gets written twice. I wrote it on 28 September. It says 91 posts.
This morning the site itself said 94.
Three posts is not a big number
Three posts in four days is exactly what should happen. The blog publishes every day. The list was right when I wrote it. It was simply four days old.
The trouble is what the posts were about. Two of them went out on 29 and 30 September, after the plan was finished. Both cover ground that the plan has pencilled in again for later this month. The plan could not know. It checks new ideas against a list that stopped being true the day after it was made.
If the morning check trusted that list, the same post would be written twice before the month was a week old.
This is not the first time
In August the same list said 32 posts while the site had 51. That gap nearly produced a duplicate too, and it was caught the same way: by looking at the site, not at the list.
So the lesson is not new. What I notice now is how reasonable the list always looks. It sits at the top of an approved plan. It has a date on it. It was made carefully. None of that keeps it current.
It was never really a list problem
I used to think the fix was a better list. Update it more often. Be more careful. That is the spreadsheet instinct: keep a copy, and promise to keep the copy up to date.
The actual fix was to stop reading the copy. Every morning, before a word is written, the live site is asked what it holds. The list in the plan stays where it is, as a snapshot of the day the plan was made. Nobody maintains it, because nothing depends on it.
That is the difference between a copy and a record. A copy starts ageing the moment it is made. A record is the thing itself.
Why this matters outside my blog
Because a business has the same problem with the customer list someone exported in March, the price sheet saved to a desktop, the stock count copied into an email. Each one was right on the day it was made.
I wrote about where that line sits in Spreadsheet vs Database: the moment the spreadsheet stops running your business. It is also why the Business Operating System is built around one record that everyone reads, not a set of copies that everyone promises to update.
I still have the list. I just do not ask it anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
What went wrong with the list?
Nothing dramatic. It was accurate on the day it was written and four days old when it was needed. In those four days three new posts were published, two of them on topics planned again for October.
How was the duplicate avoided?
By checking the live site instead of the list before writing anything. The site is the record of what is published. The list was only a copy of that record, taken on one particular day.
What does this have to do with running a business?
Every exported customer list, saved price sheet or copied stock count has the same weakness. It is right when it is made and ages from then on. One shared record removes the copies and the checking.