I have never published a first draft of anything.
Not because I am precious about my writing, and not because the first draft is bad. It is because the first draft is written by a person who does not yet know what they are saying. It is a search. The second draft is the discovery.
The pattern holds everywhere I have worked. A shift report written once is a list of events. The same report, rewritten the next morning, is a story about what actually mattered. An incident post-mortem, drafted on the night of, is a timeline. Edited a week later with the engineers who were involved, it becomes a document someone else can learn from.
The same is true of code review comments. The first draft is usually a correct observation wrapped in the wrong tone. The second pass removes the sharp edges and keeps the observation. Nobody writes their best comment on the first try.
The willingness to write something twice is the difference between output and craft. It is not about length or effort. It is about being willing to look at what you wrote an hour ago and admit that it is not quite right yet. This is harder than it sounds, because the first draft is always the one you feel proudest of. You just finished it. It exists. It says something. The temptation to ship it is enormous.
But the second draft is where the thinking actually happens. The first draft is produced by enthusiasm. The second is produced by judgment. They are different muscles, and only one of them is honest about what the piece is really about.
I do not think of this as a writing habit. I think of it as a working habit that happens to apply to writing. The verification pass on a wiring harness, the review cycle on an engineering change, the second read of a shift handover — they are all the same move. Look at what you just did. Now look at it again, slower.
The corollary is uncomfortable. If you cannot be bothered to write it twice, it probably was not worth writing once. The second pass is not a tax on the first. It is the thing that tells you whether the first was worth keeping at all.