Have you ever felt like you had to write down that email quickly, but you didn't know where to start? If that's your case, this article is going to be really useful to you, because I'm next to reveal you a powerful way to create seamless messages quickly, using templates that you can create yourself spending no more than 5 minutes!

Implementing this habit will enable you to save lot of time on-the-job.

So here's the deal:

1. Split paragraph

You can start bulding a communication template anytime you write an email, just as you usually do. You begin writing down the email, in the way that feels more natural to you. The only thing that you should pay attention to in order to also get a template out of it, is to split your message into separate blocks of text. Try to decide the text block length according to the topic you are talking about. When you change topic, open a new block.

2. Create the structure

Now that you finished writing your email, as naturally as you always do, you are ready to create this template for yourself. Take each block of text that you split accordingly, and assign a title to it. The title can recap its content, or can be a question as well. Titles will in the end create the various sections of your message template, so it's important you choose them properly. As you complete step 2, you will have your normal email, but split into entitled text blocks.

3. Give a title to the template

Assigning a title to the template itself is about framing what the whole email is about. If you are writing an acknowledgement email to one of your co-worker to let him know that a given dossier will be ready on monday, you can name it "dossier deadline", and so on. The title accomplishes the need to know yourself what the message is about, so that the next time you have a similar need, you can choose the right template by giving a glance to your templates titles that you see in your folder.

4. Enter comments

Now replace every text block with a comment that say which kind of informations the block will contain. If in a given block you are explaining what the dossier is about, you can comment that block with this line of text: "in this block of text, I describe the dossier content in detail". Comments are useful to remember why each block of the templates exists. Having entitled blocks is useful to be sure of reminding all the important things that you might say in that kind of message. Having a consistent structure will lead you to compose consistent messages, even you get the lead out. You can just replace any comment with the proper content for that situation. This let you be able to focus on writing the content rather thank thinking to the message structure itself.

5. Save the template

If you went throught the 4 steps correctly, now you should have a very general text file that has just a bunch of empty blocks, that have their title, and instead of the text, there are just some comments about what should be there. That's exactly what you want! Of course you can do this AFTER sending the true email, working for the next 5 minutes on converting it to a template useful for the next time. Or you can go into your "sent email" folder, and work on sent emails to convert some of them into templates. Each of these possibilities is fine, and will take you just a few minutes. So it's very important that you create a template folders within your computer, where you save those templates you create with their titles. You can use text files (plain text) or word document. Anyway a template is like a sketch of what the message will be in the end, so it's good to be very general.

Some people, some templates...

Some people use to compose templates in a very strict way. They write down every single thing, so they just need to replace dates, receiver name, name of the company...

That's not what I mean. The template has the purpose to stimulate your creativity and speed up the process of composing emails. Usually very specific templates are only useful for bulk emailing or so. But that's not what we made here. This is not the kind of activity that can be done by a robot, you need to assign proper titles to paragraph so you know that you are covering every important point of the message. You should be able to understand how a certain template is only good for a certain purpose, ecc. This is the only way of speeding up things without losing content quality. General templates = complete and accurate emails.

So don't be obsessive into making your templates really specific. Try rather to be an artist who is painting a sketch of his final painting.