photo credit: hughelectronic

I like to keep busy and I’m always looking for ways to be more efficient. One of the tricks that helped to accelerate me from being a “beginner” freelancer to where I am today was to have a number of branded templates on hand that I can use again and again.

This is one of those tips that I wish someone had told me when I was first starting out. In retrospect, I would have saved a lot of time. It wasn’t until I was designing – yes, designing – my fifteenth (or was it my fiftieth?) invoice that I realized: “Why am I redoing this same work over again?”

So I sat down and created templates that I can reuse again and again. (Now, as a freelance writer, I use these specific ones but you might find that you use other templates more commonly).

Proposal: I have a brief proposal with the most basic parts already filled out. (For example, my greeting letter doesn’t change all that much, with the exception of some minor customization). A customer asks me for a proposal and voila, it used to take me a couple of hours but I can now have one filled out within half an hour.

Agreement: I have a basic boilerplate agreement I keep on hand with various blanks to fill in. Again, there’s some customization but a big part of procrastination for me was avoiding the detailed-oriented administration work. But with most of it done already, this take 2 minutes to fill out and looks sharp.

Invoice: As mentioned, I have a pre-designed invoice that I simply fill in the blanks as necessary. My template has everything in it (including tax details and several boilerplate paragraphs). I just take out what I don’t need, add the numbers, and my invoices are done in minutes.

Blogs: Some of my blogs on my professional site follow a similar format. So I’ve created a template for each type of blog. That way, pictures are already uploaded and I know how I want these blogs formatted.

Ebooks: My ebooks tended to be the same (specific font, specific line spacing, with some specific design elements throughout). So I keep an ebook template on hand to save me time. Instead of designing my ebook before I start, I just open my file, “Save As” the name of the project, change the colors to my client’s preferred colors, and voila. Done in a fraction of the time.

Covers: Sometimes I need to have a cover created for an ebook or a report or something. As a freelance writer, I don’t do a lot of design but I occasionally do some minor stuff. So I keep a nice basic cover template in Microsoft Publisher. I just open it, change the name, the picture, and the title, and my cover is designed fast with no fiddling.

Take half an hour right now to think about what types of projects you can create templates for. The time you spend now will save you hours of time later.