Templates and work that comes back
A template is a decision you made once and stopped questioning. That is its value and its entire danger.
Most work repeats more than people admit, and setting that repetition up well is the cheapest productivity you will ever buy. Setting it up badly is how a workspace fills with things nobody chose.
Template the shape, not the content
Good templates carry structure: the sections a proposal needs, the steps a handover involves, the fields a bug report must have. Bad templates carry text, which then goes out with last quarter's numbers in it because somebody edited four paragraphs and missed the fifth.
The test is whether a filled-in copy could be sent unchanged. If it could, the template is doing too much. Leave the specifics empty and obviously empty — a blank line is safer than a plausible sentence that used to be true.
Make it a template on the third time, not the first
The first version of anything is wrong in ways you cannot see yet, and a template freezes it. Do the thing twice, notice what changed between them, and template the part that stayed the same.
This also stops you building templates for things that turn out to happen once. A surprising share of templates in any workspace were used exactly one time, by the person who made them.
Templates rot, and nobody notices
The document nobody owns keeps being used long after it stopped being right. It has a step referring to a tool you dropped, a section for an approval that no longer exists, a link to a folder that moved.
Put a name and a date at the top of each one. Then, when someone hits a step that is wrong, they know who to tell instead of quietly working around it — and the workaround is the real cost, because everyone invents a different one.
The recurring task nobody dares cancel
Recurring items are worse than templates, because they generate work on their own. The monthly report that three people receive and nobody reads still costs someone half a day, every month, forever.
Once a year, stop each recurring thing for one cycle rather than deleting it. If nobody asks, you have your answer and you can delete it without a debate. If someone asks in the first week, you have learned who actually depends on it — which is nearly always fewer people, and different people, than the recipient list suggests.
Questions people actually ask
What should a template contain?
Structure, not text — the sections a proposal needs, the steps a handover involves. If a filled-in copy could be sent unchanged, the template is doing too much; a blank line is safer than a plausible sentence that used to be true.
When should I turn something into a template?
On the third time. The first version is wrong in ways you cannot see yet and a template freezes it. Do it twice, see what changed, and template the part that stayed the same.
How do I deal with recurring work nobody needs?
Once a year, pause each recurring item for one cycle instead of deleting it. If nobody asks, delete it without a debate; if someone asks, you have learned who actually depends on it.
