Martha Plimpton from satire paper on teenage pregnancy , image source: www.allmovie.com
Every week brings documents, emails, new projects, and task lists. How much of that is different from the job you have done? Odds are, maybe not much. A number of our day-to-day tasks are variations on something.
Don’t reinvent the wheel every time you start something fresh. Instead, use templates–as starting point for 17, standardized documents. As soon as you save a separate variant of the template, simply add, eliminate, or change any data for that unique document, and you are going to have the work completed in a fraction of the time.
Programs work everywhere: in word processors, spreadsheets, project management programs, survey platforms, and email. Here is how to use templates and the way to automatically create documents from a template–so you can get your ordinary tasks faster.
Programs take time to construct, and it’s easy to wonder if they are worth the investment. The answer: absolutely. Editing a template requires far less time than formatting something from scratch. It is the difference between retyping it, or copying and pasting some text.
That’s not the only benefit: Using a template means you are not as likely to leave out crucial information, too. By way of example, if you want to send freelance writers a contributor agreement, modifying a standard contract template (instead of writing a new contract each time) guarantees you won’t leave out that crucial clause about possessing the content once you’ve paid for it.
Templates additionally guarantee consistency. You send clients or investors regular job updates. With a template, you know the upgrade will always have the formatting, design, and general structure.
How to Produce Great Templates
Not all templates are created equal–and some things don’t require a template. Here are a couple of guidelines to follow.
First, templates should be comprehensive. So err on the side of including too rather than too little, it’s more easy to delete information than add it .
Imagine you are developing a template of your resume. You’d want to record facts so you are going to have all the info you want to submit an application for almost any job.
You always have the option to delete less-important notes later on, but you might forget it at the final edition when it’s not in the template.
Some tools will automatically fill in these factors for you (more on this in a bit). But should you need to fill in the data on your own, add some text that is obvious and simple to search for so you can find.