Builds a maintained library of reusable document templates for a team – frequency-based selection, four-part template anatomy, style and naming conventions, and a quarterly maintenance protocol.
Builds a maintained library of reusable document templates for a team - frequency-based selection, four-part template anatomy, style and naming conventions, and a quarterly maintenance protocol. Use when someone asks "set up document templates for my team", "our docs are all formatted differently", "create a standard template for status reports or proposals", or "how do we keep templates from going stale". Do NOT use for designing Notion databases and their properties - use notion-database instead. For writing one specific process document rather than a template system, use process-doc; for visual brand rules, use brand-guidelines.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
document-template-system/SKILL.md
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name: Document Template System
description: Builds a maintained library of reusable document templates for a team - frequency-based selection, four-part template anatomy, style and naming conventions, and a quarterly maintenance protocol. Use when someone asks "set up document templates for my team", "our docs are all formatted differently", "create a standard template for status reports or proposals", or "how do we keep templates from going stale". Do NOT use for designing Notion databases and their properties - use notion-database instead. For writing one specific process document rather than a template system, use process-doc; for visual brand rules, use brand-guidelines.
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# Document Template System
A template is not a filled-out document with blanks - it is a decision made once so the team never makes it again. The costly failure is the over-built system: twenty templates nobody uses, each slightly stale, until authors quietly revert to copying last quarter's doc and the formatting drift returns. The best template systems are small, self-explanatory, and maintained by one named person.
## Operating procedure
Audit before building, build before standardizing, standardize before naming - each step's output is the next step's input.
### Step 1: Audit what the team actually produces
List the top 10 document types by frequency (count real docs from the last quarter; do not poll people on what they think they write). Build templates only for the top 5. Attempting to template everything produces a system nobody uses - every template below the frequency line is pure maintenance debt.
For each of the top 5 candidates, answer three questions before designing anything:
- Who authors this document, and how often?
- Who reads it, and what do they do with it? (A doc that drives a decision is structured differently from a doc that records one.)
- What varies between instances, and what should stay constant? The constant parts become required sections; the varying parts become variables.
If a candidate's answers are all "it depends," it is not one document type - split it or drop it.
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