Ep 113: The Power of Templates
How to Create Reusable Assets Without Losing Your Creative Edge
SUMMARY
Most creative professionals fear that using templates will make their work look cookie-cutter and generic. But what if I told you that the most innovative agencies actually rely on templates to free up their creative energy for what matters most? Today, we're exploring how to build reusable systems that save time while amplifying your unique creative voice.
The Template Mindset Shift: From Constraint to Creative Freedom
The biggest misconception about templates is that they're creative constraints. In reality, they're creative enablers. The key is understanding the difference between process templates and creative templates.
Templates eliminate decision fatigue around mundane tasks—like client onboarding or meeting structures—so you can focus your mental energy on the actual creative work. Your clients will start commenting on how much more polished and professional your process feels because you have templated results every single time.
Process Templates vs. Creative Templates: What Should You Standardize?
You're not going to use the same look and feel creatively for every single project, but you might use the same flow in which you conduct the project. The work itself—what the client sees at the end—should remain custom. But how you do the work and how you go about getting the right information should be templated.
Use my DO vs DUE Framework to identify opportunities to create margin. Where in your process are you spending too much mental energy doing the same thing over and over again? Things like:
Sending invoices
Writing contracts
Organizing files
Communicating with clients
These repetitive tasks are perfect candidates for templates.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: Templates eliminate decision fatigue around mundane tasks, freeing up mental energy for actual creative work and impressing clients with consistent professionalism.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: The 80-20 rule applies to templates—standardize 80% of your processes so you can innovate on the 20% that has the biggest impact on your business.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: Templates should be living documents that evolve quarterly, with clear version control and team feedback to ensure they remain effective and current.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "If brain surgeons and pilots that we trust our lives with are using checklists, even they understand the power of checklists to produce excellent results every single time."
💬 "You want to standardize 80% so that you can innovate on the 20% because we know that 20% of what we do has 80% of the impact on our business."
💬 "Let the questions be templated. Let the answers be custom every single time.”
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️ Book: "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande
⚡️ Free Tools: DO vs DUE Framework, Future You note-taking methodology, Time and Energy audit template - all available at dustinpead.com/free
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Most creative professionals fear that using templates will make their work look cookie cutter and generic. What if I told you that the most innovative agencies actually rely on templates to free up their creative energy for what matters most? Today, we're exploring how to build reusable systems that save time while amplifying your unique creative voice. Let's get into it.
Welcome back everyone to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, Creative process coach and consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.
Before we get into today's show, I would love to invite you to subscribe, rate and review on YouTube. If you're watching, you can hit the like button, the thumbs up, subscribe and ring the bell. Any audio podcast platform that you're listening to—a subscription, rating or review of any kind helps get this content out further to those like yourself who could benefit from it.
I also want to remind you, I have a ton of free resources for you at dustinpead.com slash free. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.com slash free. Go download as many as you like. They're completely free. My heart is to help you as a creative professional be the most efficient you can be so that the world can see what you're creating. Lastly, you can find me on social media at DustinPead—D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D. You can follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, all those places.
So that's all the business stuff. Let's get into the power of templates, creating reusable assets without losing originality. Listen, I know many of you may have already checked out. You're like, templates, ugh, boring. Same stuff over and over and over again. But what we're trying to do here is free up your mental energy. Templates eliminate decision fatigue. It's often around the mundane stuff, like the way that we onboard a client or the way that we conduct our meetings so that we get the same information every single time.
It's not even about controlling your creative process. It's about freeing up your creative process. Templates can take you from chaos to clarity, and your clients, I can promise you, are going to start commenting on how much more polished and professional that your process feels more than anyone else because you have templated results every single time, a templated formula for how you carry things out every single time.
So first, let's get into this template mindset shift. They're not creative constraints. They're creative enablers. The difference between process templates and creative templates—you need to understand those. What I'm talking about mostly here is process templates. You're not going to use the same look and feel creatively for every single project, but you might use the same flow in which you conduct the project.
First, we're going to storyboard things out. Second, we're going to put together a mood board. And then we're going to have our team, our brain trust, kind of get centered around the whole idea of what it looks like to dream this thing through. And then we're going to kind of evaluate what is actually possible. And then we're going to, and then we're going to, and then we're going to. And it's that same process over and over again that gives you those results.
So how do you identify what should be templated versus what should remain custom? I believe the work itself at the end of the day, what the client sees, should remain custom but how we do the work and how we go about getting the right information to maximize the work, to onboard the clients, to give them what they want, to deliver, to get the feedback—all the things that we talk about in this show should be templated.
It gets as simple sometimes as using a simple template like my DO versus DUE framework—the DO versus D.U.E.—and you can use that framework to identify opportunities to create margin. Where in that process and when you work from the DUE date all the way back to when you're actually going to start doing it, where in that process should it be like, hey, I'm spending too much mental energy doing the same thing over and over and over again. It's just I have to write—I have to send the invoice the same way. I have to send the contract the same way. I have to send files the same way. I have to organize our files the same way. I have to communicate with our clients the same way over and over and over again. So use templates as much as possible to create that margin for yourself.
There's an amazing book that nerds like me love to reference called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. And if I butchered that name, I'm so very sorry. But this book suggests that even surgeons use checklists, not because they don't know how to operate. It's because consistent processes prevent errors. Let me say that again. Consistent processes prevent errors. And the book says it frees mental bandwidth for complex problem solving.
So if brain surgeons and pilots, like we've talked before, are using checklists—checklists are templates, right? They're using checklists to make sure that we did this, we did this, we did this. Nothing gets missed when you use templates and checklists. Even brain surgeons and pilots that we trust our lives with when we're dangling from, you know, floating in the air in the clouds from one town to the next, even they understand the power of checklists to be able to produce excellent results every single time.
When you land in that city on the plane and you thank God that you're there, it's because that pilot had a checklist and he made sure every single thing was hit with precision the same way he did it a thousand times before that. And that's how you got there safely. And trust me, if you have to have the unfortunate circumstance where you have to have brain surgery, you definitely want that brain surgeon to be using a checklist. You don't want to leave anything to chance.
So if we're doing it there, why do we think it's not important for us to do it in our creative systems and processes? It is important. And believe me when I say this is not a constraint. This is a freedom that allows you more mental energy to think about the actual custom part of your creativity for your clients.
So we've mentioned some different ways that you can use templates already, just kind of loosely mentioned them. But let's identify some high value template opportunities in your workflow. Let's first start with client onboarding sequences. The way that you onboard your clients is a lot of—sets the tone for how they are going to work with you and how you're going to work with them. And to be able to set that tone off right and to impress right off the gate and go, wow, we really have our stuff together. We are very professional and we get stuff done and we get it done to the standards that you have for us. Those client onboarding sequences to be able to do the same thing every single time with excellence are highly invaluable.
Project kickoff materials—all right, we got them on board. Now we're gonna have a kickoff meeting to talk about what the project is. The way that you do that kickoff, the way that you do project kickoffs, whether with the client or internally with your team, sets the tone every single time. This is how it's gonna go and it makes sure that you have the information that you need.
Speaking of information, creative briefs and discovery processes. Again, great to have templates. Here's a checklist of questions that we ask every single time. When I was in ministry, we had what we called a series briefing questionnaire. This was—you go to a modern church today, you often hear a series of talks or messages or sermons centered around one type of category or theme. And so those are often referred to in the church world as a message series or collections of talks.
So what we would do is we would sit down way in the beginning, 12 weeks or so out before. We would sit down with those who were gonna be leading us through on staff. We would sit down with those and say, okay, here's the same questions we're gonna ask of every single series that we get into. Every time we sit down to have a briefing about this project, this vision that you have, we're gonna ask the same questions every single time because it's gonna get us the results, it's going to get us the answers to the questions that we so desperately need in order to communicate and to execute this project with excellence.
Status reports, progress updates, all those things sound super boring, but I promise you, those are those communication pieces that we've talked about before on this show. Those status reports and progress updates are going to be huge, and you don't want to have to rewrite them every single time. So make a template for it. It's super easy. You can automate your CRM to give you those updates. We've done it with many clients before. It's super, super easy.
Invoicing and contract structures. We talked about this before as well. Do you really want to have to write invoices and proposals and contracts and estimates and all these things? Do you really want to write those from scratch every single time? No, that takes way too much time. You could be using that time to be creative. Let's protect creative time by using these templates in all different areas from the client onboarding process all the way through the invoicing process. Again, it's about freeing up the creative work that you really want to do. It's about freeing up that mental energy and that time.
The 80-20 rule applies for templates as well. You want to standardize 80% so that you can innovate on the 20% because we know as entrepreneurs, as business leaders, as creative professionals, we know that 20% of what we do has 80% of the impact on our business. On the other 80%, let's not focus our creative energy on that. Let's use templates to standardize those things so that they can produce the same results consistently every single time so that we can focus in on that 20%, the 80-20 rule.
I've talked about my Future You methodology note taking methodology before on this podcast and it's one that I use in my coaching with our consulting clients all the time about setting up future you for success and templates are that. They are messages to your future self on this is how it needs to be done again. So you don't need to remember how it was once done before. You can always be refining those templates. But it saves you the mental energy from having to remember how did we do this last time. Take really good notes for future you. Use that Future You note taking methodology with your templates every single time.
So really when we get down to the practicals, let's walk through just an example of what a discovery template would look like to allow you to maintain structure while allowing for specific customization for your client. You're gonna ask the same things, the who, what, when, where, how, and why as much as possible. You're going to look for vision, but you're in that it's the answers that are going to give you the customization. It's not the question. The questions will remain the same. Again, you might tweak those throughout the life. And it's always kind of a working document to ask better questions. But it's the answers that are going to give you the customization. Let the questions be templated. Let the answers be custom every single time.
So you're walking through a discovery process with them. You're understanding why is this project so important? What problem are they trying to solve? When you're asking how, is there any particular communication methods or anything like that that we can do for you that would really help you feel like you're winning throughout this process while we do what we do? So you got the why, the what, you got the how. How about the who? Who's involved in this? If you don't ask those questions, then when it comes time to get feedback, you'll be wondering who even needs to get the feedback.
So then you got the when and the where. So when does this need to be done? When is this DUE to you? We use our DO versus DUE or the DO versus DUE framework to work backwards there. When, when do you need this by, when are you actually going to use this? Let's get a little bit of margin in there about when we're going to get it to you, a little bit of margin in there about when we're going to see revisions, when those time markers are. And lastly, it's the where. Where do these things need to be sent? Where is this going to be used? Where is the target market for this campaign? Where is the target market for this project? Where do these files need to be saved? Where are these things being published? All of these where questions.
So you're going to ask the same questions throughout the discovery process. Same type of questions. You can get as nuanced as you need to in order to get the proper feedback that you need to win with your clients every single time. It's the answers that are going to allow for client-specific customization. And don't give them the answers. The client will know the end result of what they want. You focus on how to get them there. And you focus on what you're going to deliver. But really, don't tell them this is what they need. You want to deliver what they need, not tell them what they need every single time. Now, if they ask you, then be ready to open it up for sure. But the client-specific customization comes from their answers, not your answers.
All right. As I said before, templates aren't just set it and forget it. They need evolution over time. They're working documents. They're wet cement. So quarterly, if you have an operations person, and if this would be something that they would do, this is something that we do with our clients—we have reminders that go off quarterly where we're going to audit all of our templates to improve those templates and improve those opportunities every single time. So every quarter, every three months, we're going to take a pause and just overhaul, edit, audit. Are these templates working? Are we using them to their full advantage? Do we need to change any of questions? You can do them more often. You can do them in real time. But at the very least, you want to quarterly audit those to identify improvement opportunities.
You want to make sure that you're gathering feedback from team members who are actually using the templates. Hey, are these templates helpful? Is there anything in there weird or confusing? Is there anything in the verbiage that doesn't sound like us, is not sound on brand? And then use version control for template libraries, which is the latest version of this. I love to use when it comes to version, instead of version one V1, V2, V3, I love to use just the simple six digit date formula. So today when I'm recording this is Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025. So I would sit there and I would mark the end of that. If I'm updating a template, I would mark the end of it 06-03-25. So when I look at it, I know, oh, this was last updated. On the file name, not even yes in the document, but on the file name at the very end, I'm going to put, oh, this template was last updated on June 3, 2025.
So let's break this down for a second. Imagine that if you started with just three core templates, just three, whether it be onboarding, discovery, delivery, invoicing, whatever. Just three templates. And over time, you were able to evolve that to, let's say, 20 specialized versions. You would then reduce the project setup time by 70% while improving client satisfaction scores. Just with three templates, you're able to improve that much. So why would you not want to do that? Use templates to increase client satisfaction and increase your efficiency every single time.
And lastly, when it comes to using templates, listen, clients understand and value professionalism. They value thoroughness. Positioning templates is a way to say, look, we have proven methods here. We don't take shortcuts. This is the way we do it. We are thorough. We are professional. And because of that, it sets clear expectations from the jump for you to be able to say, oh, I know exactly what we're getting here. And it reduces scope creep in the end because you're asking the questions that you need to ask now. And you're setting the standard out the gate with the templates, whether it's at the beginning of the project or the end of the project, the middle of the project, wherever you're using the templates, these standardized processes can actually justify how much work you're putting into it. And then you can charge more. So it justifies premium pricing. Look, look at how much work we're putting into this. But, you know, behind the scenes that these are just templated process because you have proven methods. You have proven methodologies that you can use for your thoroughness and your effectiveness every single time.
So what do we do now? I want to give you five immediate starting points to implement templates in your creativity right away. First of all, audit your repetitive tasks. Now, the way that I do this and the way that I lead this through all of my coaching and consulting clients as we use Dan Martell's time and energy audit. I created my own template for that. You can find it at dustinpead.com slash free. You can download that template and you're going to spend one, at least one week tracking every single task that you do. And as you do that, you're going to start to see repeat tasks come up over and over again. And because it's an energy audit as well, you're going to see which ones are draining you of your energy. And I bet it's the same stuff that you have to do over and over again. So that's a great place to start of how to implement systems and identifying where you need to implement templates.
Then start with just one high impact template. Choose your most time consuming. So you've done the time and energy audit. Which is the most time consuming recurring process? Is it client onboarding? Is it project briefs? Is it email communication? What is it? And then create your first template this week.
Now, when you're doing that for every template, you need to identify at least three to five places where customization could happen, and mark those areas clearly so that you can remember to personalize them. There's nothing worse than sending something out that was made from a template where it has a bracket that says insert name here. That's embarrassing. So make sure you, if you need to highlight it digitally or physically, whatever it takes, you need to bold it, italicize it, draw arrows to it, whatever it takes, make sure that you're personalizing those things before you send off a template. It's just that. It's a template. It's not what's meant to be used. It's something that you create from.
And then over time, number four, create a template library. You can set up a shared folder for your team on Google Drive or Dropbox, whatever you use. You can have those clear naming conventions and the version control like we talked about earlier with the six digit dates on the end.
And then lastly, schedule template reviews. Put quarterly, just a quick two hour block on your calendar. So once every three months, you're going to take just two hours to look at all your templates and how you can improve those existing templates based on what you learned over the last three months.
All right, let's talk about some featured resources here as we close today's episode. There's the book that I mentioned earlier, the nerd book, but it's again, super, super helpful for everybody in all walks of life. And no matter what profession you're in, it's called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. That's A-T-U-L, G-A-W-A-N-D-E. Also, I've mentioned many of my frameworks here, the DO vs. DUE framework, the Future You note taking methodology, the Time and Energy audit template that I have for you, all available at dustinpead.com slash free. And you can use content management systems for template capabilities like Notion or Airtable or Asana or Google or Dropbox, whatever it is, use those to your advantage.
I want to remind you, templates are not about limiting your creativity. They're about amplifying it by removing friction from everything that's not creative. If it's not creative, use templates for it every single time. Use the standardized. Standardize the predictable. When you do that, you create space for the remarkable. Again, I'm say it again. When you standardize the predictable, you create space for the remarkable.
If you want to dive deeper into building systems that free up your creativity, go to dustinpead.com. Click on the Let's Chat button. I would love to have a free coaching session with you on anything that I've talked about in any of these podcast episodes.
Next time on the show, we're going to talk about mind to market, how to streamline the journey from concept to completion. This is where a lot of creatives get held up and we're gonna map out how you can move ideas efficiently from that first spark, that first idea through the execution into final delivery without losing momentum or quality along the way. That's next time on the Creativity Made Easy podcast. Keep creating the world needs what you're doing. You are valuable. Cannot wait to talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.