Templates can be a clever time-saving tool in your productivity tool belt, if you know where they are in your productivity system, as well as create and use them wisely. Today, we’re discussing what a template is (or, rather, how you should use them to their best advantage), what types of templates we use in our own productivity system, and how to overcome some common obstacles in making templates in your productivity software work for you.
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In this Cast | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
EvernoteTrelloAsanaRemember the MilkMicrosoft Word (Normal.dot, Normal.dotx; you can create your own DOTX file templates), Google Calendar (duplicate events)Android personal dictionaryTasker (Android)OneNoteNotionSharePointIFTTTZapierPower AutomateActiveWordsTextExpanderApple Text ReplacementsApple ShortcutsWhat Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, PhDSkedPal Calendar Heat Map
Raw Text Transcript | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. templates can be a clever time saving tool in your productivity tool belt, if you know where they are in your productivity system, as well as how to create and use them wisely. Today, we're going to discuss what a template is, or rather how you should use them to their best advantage in your own world. We're going to talk about what types of templates we use in our own productivity systems, and how to overcome some of the obstacles and making templates in your productivity software work for you. And with that, let's start off with defining templates. What are templates in your world? How do you how do you define the template? And ultimately, how do they How does your definition of a template benefit you, in your own outputs,
Augusto Pinaud 1:14
I use template for a couple of things and or more than a couple of things. So template for me is basically something that you write Finally, in the past, so you can use multiple times towards the future. So I use them in many applications, and for many purposes, you know, respond to emails and respond, things that can be really speed up and allow me instead of thinking, the response, or the same response every time allow me to look at the issue and work with the answers in a better way.
Art Gelwicks 1:52
Yeah, for me, templates fall into a couple of different categorizations. Commonly they are things that I would use for standardizing a process to make sure that it's consistent and repeatable. Or to improve the efficiency of some step in the process, maybe a capture or discussion. Finally, to really think about the simplification of a step, because templates for me are one of those things where you don't have to think about that step anymore, you pop it up, you fill it up, you know you you do the steps, and you move on to the next thing, you're not wasting mental cycles, trying to figure out what you're trying to do. And it really becomes a refinement of it. The fourth thing, though, with templates is to me, they're an educational tool. I think a lot of people benefit from taking templates, and then taking them apart and see how they were constructed. I know I do this all the time. And it helps me understand not only the process, but how the mechanisms work and gives me an idea as to how to adapt that to my own solutions.
Francis Wade 2:57
I tell you, the funny thing about templates is that when we started discussing this topic, a few minutes ago, before before the call, I thought I don't use any templates, I don't think I have a single one, I think maybe I'll take the contrary view that people shouldn't use templates. And I'll be the contrary, and today. And right in front of me was a template that I use every single week. I know. There's something to this after all. And I as I look around my life, I realized that I'm like a template freak. If I'm not, if I'm not that then I'm at least a lazy person who tries to take for what I learned from the past. So that I don't have to redo it and rethink it because it was so hard the first time that I've somehow captured it in some kind of form that I use going forward. So I think our listeners may or may not realize that these time savers are all probably already in their life. I think the poet today is in identifying them, and then replicating the idea across as many domains as possible.
Art Gelwicks 4:08
When I think you're on an important point there too, because you said the key word for me which is form, I consider in many cases, templates to be analogous to forms because of what they're doing is providing that consistent, streamlined, efficient structure for some step in a process. And I know for me, the majority of the work I do is around these kinds of form based intake solutions. So I would put forms in that same bucket as a template.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:39
So I think about templates as being something that is from my experience something about both quality and control. So the organization that I worked for wanted to make sure that they were controlling the outputs on the other side and in your own personal productivity. system, you are the one who's benefiting your future self by giving some level of control some level of guardrails to the outputs. So a template is a very wide category of repeatable content that you can use to control what the outputs are by controlling what the inputs are. And then on the other side, recognizing that by controlling the inputs, and and some to some extent, the output, you then can increase quality. And of course, there's there's time saving and potentially money savings there. And so many other, you know, useful benefits of the repeatability and the efficiency of a template. And I'll start by by noting that in my world, a template can be content that you use in a wide variety of places. So from a checklist of items to just a snippet of a word, to your name, address, phone number, any number of different types of things, things that you're going to do, and put into a system over and over and over again, that's the type of stuff that you want to template, or what I call templatized. And so if you're going to do that you got you have to really think about am I going to do this, you know, you don't want to create a template for a document, you're going to write once. But my rule is, if I'm going to do it three times, then there's going to be a template. And as soon as I hit that second time, do I say, okay, is this going to be a third time because then it's going to be a fourth, fifth sixth, and that attack, so I might as well create a template. And so for me, the benefit is recognizing when something is worthwhile being a template, and to to be able to templatized the items that I know, I'm just constantly putting into things, why should I waste the keystrokes, the mental energy, the the potential quality missteps, when I can just put that into a template, and then with a few keystrokes, generate that content that I know is exactly what I want, or at least I have the 80% rule, kind of the Prater principle of templates, I think, what is the 80%, that that will, that will be the substance, and then I just have to fill in the pieces,
Art Gelwicks 7:24
there's an additional piece that I would quantify on templates. And that's the creation of a template is an excellent litmus test as to your level of understanding of what you're trying to template eyes. Because if you don't have a good in depth understanding of it, you're not going to be able to create an effective template, you're going to miss things, the structure is going to be wrong, it's going to be inefficient. So you have to really get what you're trying to templatized before you can create an efficient template.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:54
And going back to my experience, as someone who used to build templates in an organization, I also recognize that it's a matter of helping others who may not understand your authority domain as well as you do. And so, you know, when you're creating, in my case, you know, advanced trust and estate plans. In a law firm environment,
