As a solopreneur, you are likely to perform numerous small activities during the day that can add up to a lot of time, especially when it comes to content creation.
For example, every time you tweet a link to a page on your site, you spend a few precious minutes creating that tweet.
And every time you answer an email, you spend even more time (and probably more than you think).
You can save time on these common, albeit important, tasks by creating templates. Here are three simple steps to accomplish that.
Identify the Task
Think about the many tasks you perform each day or week. Do you send invoices? Do you post a lot of information on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Do you answer a lot of emails or send numerous communications to your contractors? What about blog posts and article writing?
You may not think that each individual task consumes much time. However, if you perform 15 tasks and each one takes 10 minutes or more, that’s at least two hours of time. Think what you could do with those extra two hours!
Make a list of all the tasks you repeat frequently. This is your critical first step.
Dig Into Your Past a Bit
Now take a look at your past documents. For example, if you are working on a template for your blog posts, then take a look at your past dozen or so blog posts. Do they have a similar format or layout? If so, what is it?
You might realize that most of your blog posts have an introductory paragraph, a transition, and then five or so bullet points followed by a conclusion and a call to action.
You can use this information to create a blog post template. If you find that you have several different types of common blog posts, you can make templates for each type.
Then, when it’s time to write, you can use the appropriate template and basically just fill in the blanks. You can also easily outsource this blogging task to an assistant now that you have a template.
Write the Template
The next step is to sit down and create the template you’ll be using. The goal here is to make filling in the blanks as easy, and fast, as possible.
For example, if you’re writing tweets, you might create five to 10 different types of tweets (different templates) with a few blanks for changing information. Here are three tweet template examples:
- “___ reasons to _____, [insert link] discover the power of ______.”
- “Are you making these ________ mistakes? [insert link]”
- “Top ____ myths preventing you from ________. [insert link]”
When you write an article or a tweet or a blog post (or other templated types of content), you can now simply fill in the blanks.
Of course, it’s important to pay attention to how these systems and templates work for you. You may need to make tweaks to the templates to make them more effective.
Using a few simple templates can give you back precious time during your day.
Author’s content used under license, © Claire Communications