Smartlife

One of the founding Smartlife principles is that you should never have to do anything twice — the computer should be able to do it for you. The Internet has extended this awesome idea, brilliantly declaring that nobody should do anything a second time. By engaging crowdsourcing, thousands of everyday tasks have been taken online, from your personal party checklist to building bits of your business.

Familiarizing yourself with these resources takes a small-time investment but the payback is incredible. Never again do you need to start with a blank…

A few months ago, I wrote a post on document reuse and explained how it can boost your document creation efficiency by 40%, on average. This post provides you a list of my top five document sharing sites where you can find reusable docs of all kinds — invoice templates, study cards, business plan samples, venture capital pitch templates, project management plan templates, graduation announcement templates, balance sheet spreadsheet templates, tournament bracket templates, and so on. There are a lot of so-called “document sharing” sites out there, but not all of them allow you to manipulate the elements (content, structure, style, and rendering) of existing documents fully. The sites that I have listed below do give you full document control, so you don’t have to waste your time re-creating what’s already been created.

Now I’ll admit document reuse isn’t exactly the sexiest topic to read about. But when you’re looking to quickly and efficiently accomplish tasks ranging from the simple to complex, document reuse is an indispensable time-saving tool that can boost your document creation efficiency, on average, by 40% (based on my personal estimation).

What is Document Reuse?

Basically, it’s a process philosophy aimed at reducing duplication. If you’re a Document Reuse Philosopher, you just don’t create a new document from the abstract unnecessarily. Instead, you reuse elements of an existing one to create a “new” document.