Reusable Documents

Repeating means reusing.

I love the second, and third, and fourth time doing something – because it gives me the chance to reuse things I’ve worked hard on. Hard-won knowledge, certainly, but even more frequently, carefully crafted documents.

In my sixth time supervising the Michigan All-State Choir, I have a carefully crafted running document with every announcement I give after each rehearsal segment. I might have changed one or two this year, but I was delighted to discover that most of what I needed to announce was already present in the document I started working in in 2018.

The truth is, that is true for so many of the documents I use day-to-day. I’m not inventing or creating – I’m adapting, reusing, modifying. And the beauty of that is that my time and mental effort is saved, so I can devote it to other things.

How many documents do you use or generate in a year? What percentage of them are reused from previous years?