Template Thinking: The Art of Reordering Work

The System Problem

Remember when you could close your laptop at 5pm, knowing everything important was handled until tomorrow? When your one productivity app actually made work easier?

If those feel like distant memories, you’re not alone. This isn’t about keeping up with technology or losing your edge. As AI becomes central to knowledge work, mastering templates and patterns is becoming essential.

The systems and workflows that served us brilliantly for decades are buckling under the weight of modern work. That anxiety you feel when you see 1,047 unread messages in your Gmail? That’s not personal failure – it’s system failure.

This breakdown isn’t just inevitable, it’s necessary. Everything follows a pattern: order, disorder, reorder. The ad hoc solutions we’ve cobbled together over the past 20 years can’t handle today’s complexity (disorder). It’s like trying to manage a library where the books change content daily and multiply overnight. The old card catalog system, no matter how well-organized, simply wasn’t designed for that kind of dynamic content.

But there’s good news: Once you recognize that your systems need updating – not you – a new path forward emerges. Unlike adding another productivity app or creating another checklist, true reordering requires rethinking how we structure work itself. It starts with a fundamental reorder in how we think about our work: template thinking.

This is a different way of seeing patterns hidden in your daily work. Once recognized, these patterns become building blocks for everything from basic email management to sophisticated AI automation. Understanding templates and prompts isn’t just about immediate productivity gains—it’s the foundation for working with future AI tools like custom GPTs and AI agents. But first, we need to harness our innate biological tendencies.

Understanding Pattern Recognition

Your brain is fundamentally a pattern-recognition system. Every routine and workflow you’ve mastered becomes a structured process for greater efficiency.

Think about your typical workday. These subconscious patterns shape everything:

• How you process email (scan, sort, respond)
• How you take meeting notes (format, highlights, follow-ups)
• How you plan your week (priorities, time blocks, reviews)

Each of these is already a template. In fact, most of our day is a “habit loop” from the moment we wake, commute to work, come home, make dinner, and settle into sleep. As James Clear explains, our brains automatically create these patterns to conserve mental energy for more important decisions. It’s an efficiency mechanism developed over millennia. But in today’s digital workplace, some of our unconscious patterns may be working against us: we’re not conscious of our templates. And when we’re not conscious of them, we’re unable to adapt them when they stop working.

This is why throwing more productivity apps at the problem doesn’t help. Adding another tool without understanding your existing patterns is like building a house on shifting sand. Instead, we need to:

1. Recognize our existing templates
2. Make them explicit
3. Update them for the AI era

Once you start seeing your work behavior through this lens, opportunities for improvement become obvious. Those daily frustrations? They’re signals pointing to templates that need an upgrade.

And this is why template thinking is foundational for mastering AI. Because AI doesn’t just need instructions, it needs patterns. When you can identify the patterns in your work, you can teach AI to replicate and automate them.

Here’s what this looks like in practice…

Building Your Template System

Let’s start small, with a template you already use: your morning routine. Maybe you check email, scan headlines, and review your calendar. That’s a template – one you can teach AI to enhance.

Here’s how template thinking evolves:

Level 1: Personal Templates

• Notice how you handle recurring tasks (like responding to emails or preparing meeting agendas)
• Document your common workflows (like how you prepare for committee meetings)
• Identify repetitive steps in your administrative or research processes

Level 2: Process Templates

• Create reusable structures for common tasks (like storytelling templates)
• Build simple automations (like email filters)
• Connect related tasks into workflows (like calendar-to-task integrations)

Level 3: AI Templates

• Design prompts that leverage your professional expertise (like research analysis or instructional design)
• Create custom AI assistants for departmental processes (like writing SOPs or grant applications)
• Build workflows that combine your judgment with AI efficiency (like literature reviews or program assessments)

Getting Started

This approach requires no special tools or training. Start with a task that frustrates you, document your current process, and look for patterns. That’s template thinking in action.

As you practice this, you’ll start seeing templates everywhere – from orientation presentations to weekly updates to Canvas sites. Each is a chance to work smarter — and less!

The goal isn’t to automate everything—it’s to move from disorder to a new order that puts you back in control. Start small: notice one pattern that’s causing friction, make it explicit, and ask whether it’s ready for reordering. Your brain already knows how to create templates. Now you can do it intentionally, one pattern at a time.

When you close your laptop at 5pm, you’ll feel the difference. Instead of that nagging anxiety about unfinished work, you’ll have the calm confidence that comes from having systems that actually work. That’s the power of template thinking—it doesn’t just make you more productive, it gives you your life back.