Workflow and Copyediting Time

It's copyediting time for me. On my team, that means a lot of topics are all now ready for me to do what might be my final edit pass over them—in fact, half of the documentation set for this product is ready. The other half will be ready in about a month, and I'll have some brief amount of time to review them all before the final handoff date. I don't know how other teams work; it would make sense to spread this out more evenly throughout the writing cycle, but the way the documentation process works it's pretty much impossible.
Our process works this way. After we have worked out what we're going to write, the writers create topics based on specs and interaction with the product team (we're all on the same floor of our building). When a topic is basically filled out, the writer sends the topic to the other writers, the manager, and me for peer review. We all make comments, and this is where I do my developmental edit for the topic. The writer incorporates our comments into the topic and marks it as ready for tech review.
We have a few tech reviews that are scheduled into the product team's time. Each tech review lasts about a week. When we reach the tech review time, all the topics that are marked as ready for review are sent to the subject matter experts for review. In this product cycle, we have only two reviews so each review gets half of the documentation set. After the review, the writers incorporate comments and mark the topics as ready to be copyedited. Because the writers work pretty closely with the product team throughout the writing cycle, there usually aren't many big changes to the docs at this point.
So that's where we are now—I have a big queue of topics to edit that I would like to finish before Christmas, because the writers are busy working on the new topics that need developmental edits and I don't like to rush those. Fortunately, copyediting goes pretty quickly after all the reviews each topic has had.