I've come to realize that the way I could've done this originally was by creating a Dev version, cloning it with sync to create a Prod, then unsyncing. Then the process should be just resyncing when you're ready to push your changes. That being said, I'm sure most of us are way past being able to retroactively do this and I do feel like the more natural workflow is to use versioning and have a checkbox that says something like "publish to production".