don’t get too precious about your templates (in the messy middle)

I love the early days of a project, when it’s all ugly google docs and impromptu meetings. This is a fun season, one that feels full of possibility. 

It can also be a really inefficient season - you’re often digging around looking for that one template you used on that other project. You’re trying to remember that gsheet formula (or the specific prompt you gave Claude to generate that gsheet formula). 

With a good ops-y detail-oriented person around, some order will be imposed on these early, clumsy efforts. You’ll find your way to templates that save time for more important thinking and doing.

Most teams I’ve been on fall into a trap though, in their adolescent phase. They get precious about their templates. They lose sight of the thing the templates were supposed to accomplish. This can show up as two distinct failure modes: 

1) too little attention, leading to staleness: you barely adjust the template from one use to the next, so that the content in the container becomes stale and easy to ignore 

2) too much attention, leading to irrelevant boxchecking: you obsess over the completion of each subsection of the template, even when the current situation doesn’t match the one the template was originally created for. 

I see this happen most often with quarterly or annual goal setting. (It shows up sometimes with data tracking, too.) Meeting the stylized criteria of OKRs or KPIs or SMART goals stands in for good, clear thinking about what the heck Must Be True by the end of the time period we’re talking about.  

You probably chose this template in the first place because you wanted to do or change something with the information in it. Double check, now: will I do or change anything based on what I put in this template? If not, chuck it.

-eric