One of the most useful methods for reducing the time and effort a common task can take is to eliminate boilerplate. Today, we're going to look at any writing that's necessary for the task that we're automating, and we're going to try to reduce the effort that goes into that writing as much as possible.

Boilerplate is any text or structure that is the same every time, but for whatever reason, necessary. It can range from phrases that you repeat a lot to document section headers, title pages and fineprint. I'm also including in my definition other kinds of repetitive text and even concepts, such as common links and today's date or the current time.

By reducing the amount of effort you need to put into these repetitive texts in your day-to-day, you can save hours of time that you would have otherwise spent typing.

Templates

We've talked a lot about Excel templates in this newsletter, and I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of a document template. You may also know that most email programs have email templates as a feature. So if you have a report or email that needs to be generated as part of your task, you should probably put as much of the structure and repeating text into a template!

Here's a tip: on many webmail platforms you can copy the link for the email template (i.e. right click and copy the link before it's been used to generate the new email). Then you can use that link in your SOP (or trigger) to start the email from the template directly!

You'll notice that this newsletter always ends with a signoff and a bunch of links - that's in a template too, a feature of the platform that hosts them.

Text Expanders

Templates are great, but they're not always available, nor the right tool for the job. Sometimes you need to be able to insert some boilerplate text on-the-fly as you write. That's where text expanders come in.

Text expanders (also called snippets or sentence expanders) are programs that allow you to configure triggers that will insert text wherever you are. For example, I have a text expander that runs on my computers. If I write ":tags" anywhere, it immediately gets replaced with a list of my most commonly used hashtags for when I post an article about spreadsheets. I also have one for sending a link to my to my meeting room (:zoom), and for inviting people to schedule on my Calendly page (:calendly) and so on.

Some common text expanders include Espanso, TextExpander and TextBlaze. Microsoft Word has QuickParts that you can configure, and there are text expander plugins for Chrome and Firefox. Some text expanders have more advanced templating features as well, allowing you to have fillable parts within the blocks of text.

Personally I like the consistency across programs that a global text expander like Espanso gives you, but you'll have to be able to install a program to run in the background for that - not necessarily something you can do in a corporate setting.

Autocomplete

You can have similar speedup in writing by enabling autocomplete where you write. This one's a bit more intrusive - and you might find it annoying. Basically just like when you're texting on your phone, the program guesses what your word is from the first few letters and provides suggestions. There's usually a key that you press (such as tab) to complete the word - hopefully you don't have to reach for a mouse since that would defeat the purpose!

In Word you can enable Autocomplete Suggestions and Text Predictions in the proofing menu. Similarly in Google Docs you can enable Smart Reply, or use an extension for more functionality.

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Ok. So now we've gone through our task and reduced the amount of typing we have to do to a minimum. I strongly encourage you to try one of the global text expanders if you can, it can be a game changer!

Until next time, thanks for reading!

– Brendan

p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website.