10 document templates to start your week

A blank page is where good intentions go to die. Most of what a small team writes each week is the same handful of documents, so the useful move is not writing better prose but having ten document templates ready and knowing what belongs in each. Below is the set that covers most weeks, with the fields that make each one worth opening rather than skimming.

The ten document templates worth having

• Meeting agenda — topics with owners and time boxes, circulated before rather than after. Without owners it is a wish list.
• Meeting minutes — decisions and actions only, with dates. Discussion belongs in people's memories, not in a record somebody may read in two years.
• Weekly status update — what shipped, what slipped, what needs a decision. Three headings, never more.
• Project brief — the problem, the success measure, the constraints and who decides. One page.
• Decision record — the decision, the alternatives considered and why they were rejected. This is the document whose absence costs the most, six months later.
• One-to-one agenda — a shared running note rather than a fresh page each time, so the previous fortnight is visible.
• Handover document — accounts, routines, open threads and who to ask. Written before the holiday, not during it.
• Client or supplier onboarding note — contacts, dates, commercials and the agreed route for questions.
• Incident note — what happened, when, what was done, what changed afterwards. Short, blameless and factual.
• Standard operating procedure — the steps for something you do repeatedly, written in the words the person doing it uses.

What makes a template get used

Length is the main reason templates fail. A one-page brief gets filled in; a six-page brief gets replaced by an email saying "see below". The second reason is fields nobody can answer at the moment of writing — asking for a success measure during intake is useful, asking for a full risk assessment is not. Cut anything you would skip yourself under time pressure, and let the longer version be a separate document for the rare case that needs it.

Keep one owner per template. Documents with no owner acquire fields from everybody who ever found them lacking, and a template that grew by accretion is the one people start working around.

Setting them up

1. Start with the three documents your team writes most often, not with all ten.
2. Write each one as a filled-in example rather than as an empty form — people copy examples and ignore blanks.
3. Put them where the work happens, not in a separate folder somebody has to remember.
4. Review them once a quarter and delete fields that are consistently left empty.
5. Let anyone propose a change, but keep approval with the owner.

Ettex Docs keeps these as a template set you can copy into a document in one step, and the decisions and actions that come out of them belong in a register rather than in the document itself. The split matters: the document records what was discussed, the register is what somebody can filter by overdue date.