Stop using templates. Start with a blank page.

I know why you use templates. I've used them too.

They feel like a shortcut. Someone else has done the hard thinking. You just duplicate, fill in the gaps, and start. Except you don't start — you spend forty minutes reorganising someone else's structure to feel less like theirs, and then you abandon it two weeks later because it never quite fit.

What templates actually are

A template is a system built around someone else's work, someone else's responsibilities, and someone else's way of thinking. The person who built it had specific problems they were trying to solve. Those problems are not your problems.

When you use their template, you inherit their assumptions. The views they built, the categories they chose, the information they decided was important — all of it designed for their context, not yours.

This is why templates feel good initially and fail over time. In the beginning, the structure feels helpful because any structure feels helpful. But as your actual work fills the space, the misfit becomes visible. The categories don't quite work. The views surface the wrong things. You start working around the system rather than with it.

What a blank page forces you to do

Starting with a blank page is uncomfortable. There's no scaffolding, no prompt, nothing to react to. You have to think.

Specifically, you have to think about what you actually do, what information you actually need, and what decisions you actually make. Not in theory — in practice. Right now, this week, in your actual role.

That thinking is the work. And it's work most people avoid by reaching for a template.

How to actually start

Open Notion. New page. Write down the answer to one question: what are the three things I am actually responsible for delivering in the next thirty days?

Not your full job description. Not your objectives from your last appraisal. The three real things that sit with you when you wake up at 3am.

Build from that. One database for each. Three views maximum — what's urgent, what's in progress, what's done. Nothing else until you've been using it for two weeks.

Then iterate. Add what's missing. Remove what you're not using. Build toward the system your work actually needs — not the system a template decided you should have.