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Every week brings documents, emails, new projects, and task lists. How much of that is totally different from the job you’ve done before? Odds are, not much. Many of our tasks are variants on something we’ve done hundreds of times before.
Don’t reinvent the wheel each single time you start something fresh. Use templates–standardized documents with formatting and text as starting point. As soon as you save a separate variant of the template add, eliminate, or change any info for that document, and you are going to have the job completed in a fraction of the time.
Programs work anywhere: in word processors, spreadsheets, project management programs, survey platforms, and also email. Here is how to use templates and to automatically create documents from a template–so you can get your common tasks faster.
Templates take time to build, and it’s easy to wonder whether they’re worth the investment. The answer: absolutely. Editing a template requires much less time than formatting something. It is the difference between retyping it, or copying and pasting some text.
That’s not the only benefit: Using a template means you’re less inclined to leave out key information, also. By way of instance, if you want to send freelance authors a contributor arrangement, modifying a standard contract template (instead of composing a new contract each time) guarantees you won’t depart out that crucial clause regarding owning the content as soon as you’ve paid for this.
Templates also guarantee consistency. Maybe you send regular job updates to investors or customers. With a template, you understand the upgrade will have the same formatting, layout, and arrangement.
How to Create Great Templates
Not all templates are created equal–and a few things do not need a template. Here are a couple of guidelines to follow.
First, templates must be comprehensive. It is simpler to delete info than add it in, so err on the side of adding rather than too small.
Imagine you’re developing a template of your own resume. You would want to record details about your responsibilities and achievements, and that means you’ll have.
You can delete notes later on, but when it is not from the template you might forget it in the last version.
Some tools will automatically fill in these factors for you (more on this in a bit). But should you have to fill in the information on your own, add some text that is simple and obvious to search for so you can find.