Welcome to the twenty first century. (for eventual publication) means something different now than it did twenty years ago.
If you are building your career and have to follow certain steps to do traditional publishing in journals, then you have deadlines forced upon you (unless you have tenure, in which case your paycheck is not so deadline dependent), and that should factor into your process. I am vaguely aware of different styles my advisors used, but they were different people. I imagine both had several papers in the pipe and protocols for when to tweak and when to let go.
If you have the benefit of naming your own schedule, then I suggest ArXiv when you are not embarrassed by the resulting article, and updating every year as needed. That combines Ben McKay's "shovel" suggestion with the opportunity of "error tracking" as suggested in RBega's comment above. I think this method is very effective if you have a large goal in mind, such as rearranging your work in book form for students to follow. (Replace every year by your own interval, but be careful about overly frequent public changes.)
Gerhard "You Worry About Version Tracking" Paseman, 2018.09.27.