Work smarter, not harder. We hear this far too often. But what does it actually mean? Having been in a leadership role for almost 10 years, I know what it feels like to work hard. I’ve had my share of early mornings and late nights, as well as some weekends. The trick to knowing how to work smarter doesn’t come from a magical tool that will automate your work and life for you. Although I would love something like that, there’s really nothing out there that can ‘do’ my work for me (yet…insert AI comments).

Figuring out how to work smarter started with me paying attention to what work I actually spent time doing. What did I do a lot of, consistently? What type of work am I doing on a regular basis. What applications was I using regularly and what was I doing with them. It took me some time, but I started to take note of what I spent a lot of my time on, and then I began to build: templates.

Yes, templates. Let me explain.

In my role as a leader, I spend much of my time with my team. I also spend most of my time presenting, managing projects, delivering updates on progress or outcomes, and…strategic thinking. There are some aspects of my role I will never be able to create a template for, nor would I want to (it wouldn’t be authentic). For example, meeting with my team members during their 121’s, while I may have an agenda with topics I want us to cover, I’m not reading a script during our meeting. The same goes for strategic thinking. I just need time to jot down my thoughts, brainstorm, run scenarios through my mind. This usually happens outside of my work hours. I need to think in peace. I also can’t have a template for this. I just let my mind think.

But for the work where I am presenting, managing projects, and delivering updates on progress or outcomes, I have templates. Like, a lot of templates.

Why?

Because I don’t have time to build everything from scratch every single time I need to prepare for a presentation. As a side note: I know the ins and outs of my role, what we do within the three teams I manage, our challenges, our successes. I know it all off the top of my head. The challenge isn’t presenting in front of a group, for example. The challenge is creating a compelling presentation that will capture your audience. It’s about taking a boring subject like data entry and turning it into a story where the audience will feel the impact your making is contributing to the overall success of the company.

So, I build templates. I reuse (in this case of presentations) my presentations over and over again. I simply tweak them, making sure they’re relevant and captivating.

My templates are one of my biggest keys to success.

Many people have taken my templates and used them for their own agenda’s, presentations or projects and have saved a ton of time on formatting/building and spent more time on the value: content creation.

Templates are underrated, underutilized but very affective. You can also complete your tasks (presentations or briefs) in nearly half the time just by leveraging a template you’ve created. I recycle them all the time, making them better and better. When I need to prepare for a meeting, I leverage existing agendas, I use the same PowerPoint presentations, and I tweak where necessary.

I have about 5 PowerPoint templates (1 for each of the main departments I lead, 1 for development and team engagement and 1 for onboarding). I also save all my presentations that I’ve ever presented. I have over 150 saved Presentations from the last 7 years.

Here’s my process to setting up a new slide deck for a presentation:

Open my presentation template.
Open previous presentations where I have delivered a similar message (i.e. quarterly review, kick-off meeting, etc.).
I begin to pull in slides from previous presentations, where I feel the messaging is still relevant to share, with updates for this quarter.
Once I have all the slides I need, I begin to update the deck with refreshed data.
Lastly, I may plug in 1 or 2 more slides depending on the audience or new developments since the last time I presented.
I review, practice, tweak and save.

That process takes me about 1-2 hours. Without the template, it would take me about 1-2 days to complete (around my other competing priorities.

The same goes for meeting agenda’s for our quarterly meetings. I have a template I use for every quarterly meeting. I have templates for all my 121’s with my direct reports.

There’s nothing wrong with reusing something that is already working. If it works for you, use it again and again, making your work easier, and thus working smarter. But you need to take the time to assess what work you do over and over, then find an application/tool you can leverage to build your template in.

Looking for some templates? I’m more than happy to share.

Let’s connect: https://www.mentorsformanagers.com/training-mentorship

THE MANAGER TOOLKIT