A weekly to-do list has a different job from a daily one. The daily list decides what you do next; the weekly list decides what the week can realistically hold — which means its most useful function is leaving things off. Most weekly lists are wish lists with…
A press release has exactly one reader: a journalist with a full inbox deciding, in a few seconds, whether there is a story here. Every convention in the format — the release line, the dateline, the inverted pyramid, the hash marks at the end — exists to make…
Monthly budgets rarely fail because somebody overspent on coffee. They fail for an arithmetic reason: the costs that break a household do not arrive monthly. Insurance, car tax, Christmas, the dentist, the annual subscription — none of them appears on a budget built around a typical month, and…
Most people sign a separation agreement the wrong way round. They spend weeks arguing over the wording about the children — which a court can revisit at any time, because a child’s welfare is not something two adults can settle between themselves — and skim the property and…
A ten frame is not a counting grid. Its purpose is almost the opposite: to stop a child counting one dot at a time and get them seeing a quantity whole. That is why the shape is specifically two rows of five rather than ten boxes in a…
The difference between a task list and a project task list is one column: what has to finish before this can start. Without it you have a to-do list that happens to be about a project — forty rows, all apparently equal, no way to tell which one…
A volunteer attendance sheet looks like a staff timesheet and does a different job. Nobody is being paid from it, so its value lies elsewhere: it tells you who is on the premises if the building has to be evacuated, it is the evidence behind the volunteer hours…
A time off request form has two jobs, and the obvious one is the lesser of them. Yes, it tells a manager who wants which days. More importantly it creates a dated record of what was asked and what was answered — which is what you need when…
An agenda is not a list of topics. It is a decision about what the meeting is allowed to do — and for some bodies that is literally true, because anything not on the posted agenda cannot be voted on. Even in an ordinary team meeting the same…
A bookmark is one of the few things you design where the physical specifications decide whether it works. Get the size right and it sits in a paperback without sticking out; get the margins wrong and every one you cut has a white sliver down one edge. These…
Six free amortization schedule templates in Microsoft Excel, for mortgages, car loans and any other loan repaid in equal instalments. A monthly payment figure tells you what leaves your account. An amortization schedule tells you where it goes — and on a long loan, the answer is startling…
A checklist is not a to-do list, and confusing the two is why so many of them get abandoned. A to-do list helps you remember what to do. A checklist exists for work you already know how to do, and its only job is to stop a known…
A bridal shower guest list is not a list you build from scratch. It is a subset of the wedding guest list, and that one constraint decides almost everything about it — because inviting someone to the shower who will not be invited to the wedding asks them…
A website proposal is a scope document wearing a sales document’s clothes. Almost every web project that ends badly does so for one of two reasons — nobody agreed what “finished” meant, or the client never sent the content — and both are decided in the proposal rather…
Six free bid proposal templates in Microsoft Word, for responding to a tender, an invitation to bid or a formal request for proposal. Before the writing, though, there is a calculation worth doing — because most firms that bid a lot and win occasionally are losing money on…
Six free partnership agreement templates in Microsoft Word. No document is required to form a partnership — which is exactly why you need one, because in its absence the law supplies terms almost nobody would choose. The most expensive of them: whatever each of you put in, the…
Six free real estate brochure templates. There are two quite different documents here — the brochure that sells you to a prospective seller, and the one that sells a property to a prospective buyer — and the second carries legal obligations the first does not. Templates6 designs FormatEditable…
Six free printable daily planner pages, for a ring binder or a clipboard. What separates a planner page from a to-do list is that it makes you rank the day before you start it — and the ranking, not the layout, is where the benefit lives. Pages6 designs…
Most chore lists fail for the same two reasons: nobody agreed who owns each job, and nobody agreed what finished looks like. “Tidy the kitchen” means wiped counters to one person and a scrubbed hob to another, so the job gets done twice or not at all. These…
A memo is not a short letter and not a long email. It is an internal document written to go into the record, which means two things: the reader will skim it, and somebody may read it a year from now with no memory of the context. Both…
Six free moving packing list templates in Microsoft Excel. An inventory makes unpacking easier, which is the obvious reason to keep one — and it is also the document that decides what you get paid if a box arrives broken or never arrives at all, which is the…
