Don’t let those great emails and reports go to waste. Turning your best communications into templates is like trading in a hammer for a nail gun.. You’ll work more efficiently, and more important you’ll be building systems to do the repetitive stuff that allows you to spend more time with the high-value activities.
Places you’ll want to use templates
Most jobs have tasks that are done more than once. Many jobs have tasks that are repeated several times a day, or even multiple times per hour.
If you’re typing out the same email over and over again, please stop and make a template for that email. Your time is more valuable that that.
What’s a template, you might be asking? A template is a pre-defined something (list, message, document, slide, whatever) that gets you most of the way there, and you just customize the parts you need to.
Even if you have a super-clunky piece of software you’re dealing with, you can probably save a text file on a folder on your computer. Save the message that you write multiple times a day into a text file, and do CTRL-A, CTRL-C, and CTRL-V (select everything in the text file, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the program). Edit the pieces you need to that are unique to the message, and you’re done.
Way easier than fat-fingering the whole thing each time, isn’t it?
That’s a template at work.
Why you need to make templates
Building your own template library gives you a tailored set of tools that helps you to work more efficiently. Build up a library that is useful to you.
Distilling the reusable parts of something you do multiple times a day is an analysis skill (taking something apart into its components). Understanding how the pieces make the whole is useful. Understanding the pieces that change (the customizations) is even more useful.
Making templates sets you apart within your organization. It prioritizes reusability and the natural offshoot of it is the development of systems and processes that are useful to your organization.
Why you need to use templates
A template library that you created adds to your value as an employee. If you keep it to yourself, it frees up your time to investigate higher-value activities in your organizations, take on additional projects, or expand your work areas.
If you decide to share your template with your group or the broader organization, you’ll get the attention of decision makers that will see you as a team player and as someone who makes the organization more efficient. It will also afford you opportunities and allow you to help your employees do their work more efficiently.
In a business or personal setting, templates can be like little workers that save you time and do things that build your business. These templates can be used within the business, or they can be sold (more on that below).
Here are some examples of templates I use
You can put templates to good use in a lot of places. Here are a few that I use.
Email signature
If you work in an office environment, you likely have used this one already to put your name, email, phone, organization, etc., at the bottom of every email.
I have three signatures in Outlook at work. One is just “Thanks! R/ John W” for people on my team. This is the default, and if I’m just doing a quick response, I needn’t type anything else in the email. Another one has more information for people I’m sending an initial email to, or for situations that are more formal. A third has a full fill-in-the-blank template for certain kinds of emails that require a distribution statement.
(Come to think of it, I could really “abuse” the signature capability of Outlook to put in full emails that I send regularly. No need to make it just about a signature!)
Outside of my day job, I include a link to my website in pretty much every email I send out. This is an old trick that amounts to free marketing. At some point I’ll add a call to action for people to sign up for my newsletter or get a free ebook from me.
Email and blog comment requests for serial number pricing information
An email template was how I drove a few hundred dollars in sales for a paid ebook on fancy serial numbers, and also how I led people to sign up for my Cool Serial Facebook group, which is now over 20,000 members strong.,
After publishing a few posts on fancy serial numbers, I regularly got emails asking for advice on a particular bill. I’m generally a helpful guy but answering these questions was starting to take up real time, and I’d never hear from the person again after answering their question.
So, I started a Facebook group to build a community around serial number hunters, and used a Mozilla Thunderbird extension called QuickText to insert custom text into an email reply that (a) led them to my Facebook group, or (b) led them to my YouTube channel to learn, or (c) led them to my ebook that would help them learn. I was no longer giving away free advice; they had to do something to get the information.
The QuickText extension automated most of the creation of this email, and made it quick to respond consistently to these kinds of questions.
Todoist tasks
I’m becoming pretty good friends with Todoist to help me remember, and schedule, all of the stuff I want to do.
Todoist has a comma-separated value (CSV) template feature that allows bulk upload of tasks. This has come in really handy uploading tasks that I might want to get ahead on rather than just repeat:
- My side job as a church music director requires that I schedule the worship sets and create the song presentation to be run during the service for the congregation. A small set of formulas and fill down lets me create the tasks for a few months, and I upload these into Todoist easily.
- Bible plans work really well in the same way.
Website legal boilerplate
These are templates I paid for and can use on multiple sites I own, but they’ve saved me a ton of time and worry. Most of the legal text is already written and it’s just a matter of inserting the site-specific pieces.
Your turn! Make a template, any template
Any of the areas above inspire you? Try your hand at making it reusable and fly through your day a bit easier!
(Header photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash)