---
name: kill-a-draft
description: Use when a draft has been through two or more rounds of edits and still is not right.
---

# Know When to Kill a Draft

Sunk cost keeps bad drafts alive, and the usual outcome is publishing something mediocre to justify the hours already spent. Every published weak page also has a cost after publication: it competes with your stronger pages, it dilutes topical focus, and someone will have to maintain it. Killing drafts needs to be a normal, cheap decision made against stated criteria rather than a judgement about the writer.

## What you need first

- the original brief and its stated purpose
- the current draft and its edit history
- the SERP for the intended query as it stands today

## Method

1. Ask what question this page answers better than anything currently ranking. If the honest answer is "the same, but written by us", stop here - that page has no route to visibility.
2. Check whether the topic was ever winnable. If page one is entirely major brands, forums or tools, no amount of editing changes the format mismatch.
3. Count the rounds. Beyond two substantive edit rounds, the problem is nearly always the brief or the topic, not the prose, so a third round of line edits will not save it.
4. Separate salvage from rescue: extract the two or three genuinely good paragraphs into a notes file for use elsewhere, then kill the rest. Most dead drafts contain something reusable.
5. Consider merging into an existing page. Material too thin to stand alone often strengthens a page that already ranks, and this is usually the highest-value outcome.
6. Record the reason for killing it in one line and feed it back into briefing. Drafts die for repeating reasons, and unrecorded reasons produce the same dead draft again.

## What this produces

A documented kill, merge or salvage decision with the reusable material extracted and the cause logged.

## Where this goes wrong

- Publishing anyway because the work is paid for, adding a page you will later pay again to prune
- Blaming the writer when the brief never contained anything proprietary to write about
- Killing the draft without extracting the good sections or logging the reason, so the effort is lost twice

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/kill-a-draft