Never Start From a Blank Page

Part 2 of 7: Documents in the Wild

Let me introduce Marcus. Marcus records a podcast every week and runs a team standup every Monday, and Marcus has strong opinions about wasted effort. His podcast show notes always have the same skeleton: episode title, guest, timestamps, links mentioned, a call to action. His meeting notes always have the same skeleton too: attendees, agenda, decisions, action items. And for two years Marcus rebuilt those skeletons by hand, every week, from an empty page.

That empty page is a tax. It is small, it is invisible, and you pay it every single time you sit down. Templates are how you stop paying it, and Documents ships with a drawer full of them.

Twenty-eight starters, already in the drawer

Open the Documents workspace and hit New From Template. The first time, it will offer to seed the defaults for you, and when you say yes it drops a _templates folder into your workspace and fills it with twenty-eight starters.

The "New from template" picker open as a modal, listing built-in starters including Announcement, Changelog, Content Brief, Decision Record, Meeting Notes, and Newsletter

The template picker. Pick one, get a real document pre-structured for the job.

They are not filler. There is a meeting-notes template with an agenda and an action-items table. A reading-notes template with a spot for quotes worth keeping and your own take. A decision record with context, options considered, and consequences, which is the single best habit I have picked up in years of writing things down. There is a newsletter, a changelog, a project brief, an interview guide, a retrospective, a podcast show-notes layout with a timestamps table, and (because this is a cross-posting product) a cross-post strategy sheet with per-platform character limits already noted. Marcus has three of these open every week.

Pick one and it becomes a new document you own, with a fresh copy of that structure and a unique filename. Edit it into oblivion, delete the parts you do not want, keep the ones you do. The template is a starting point, not a cage.

The best template is the one you write

Here is the part I actually love. The twenty-eight are just documents that happen to live in the _templates folder. Which means any document you put in that folder becomes a template you can spin up new copies of.

So Marcus did the obvious thing. He took his own show-notes format, the one tuned to his show and not a generic one, saved it into _templates, and now every Monday he starts a new episode from his skeleton in one click. The generic podcast template got him 80% of the way; his own version gets him 100%. There is no separate "create a template" flow to learn. If you can make a document, you can make a template, because they are the same thing.

That is the whole trick, and it compounds. Every format you find yourself rebuilding is a template you have not written yet. Write it once, file it under _templates, and the blank page stops being your problem.

Next up, what to do once you are actually typing: the formatting toolbar, the keyboard shortcuts worth learning, and dropping a picture straight into the page.

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