Templates: How to Save a Request You Keep Retyping

Three Mondays ago you wrote the whole thing out. How long the clips should be, where the captions sit, which eight minutes to skip, what you wanted back besides the files. It came out right.

Two Mondays ago you wrote most of it. This Monday you wrote two lines, because you were in a hurry and could not remember the rest, and what came back is fine in a way that is worse than right. Nothing got worse except the request. Each week you rebuilt it out of memory, and memory drops the specifics first: the number, the exception, the correction you made in a follow-up message the first week and never wrote down anywhere.

The fix is a copy, not a better memory. A template is a request you already wrote, saved under a name, so the next run starts from the version that worked instead of from what you can recall of it. It is text and nothing else. No dropdowns, no settings, no fields to fill, which means anything you would type in a message belongs in one. If the word makes you picture a layout with slots for your photo, that is the other meaning of it, and not this one. The ready-made ones that come with the product run between about 300 and 750 words each. Short is not a virtue here.

Your best one is a message you already sent

Do not open a blank editor. Go and find the run that went well, and scroll up to what you typed.

That message is most of the template. The rest is in the follow-ups underneath it, and those are the part people throw away. "Make the captions bigger." "Do not fade the last clip." Each of those was a decision you made once, applied to one file, and then lost. In a template it is a line you never type again.

Saving it takes two things, a name and the words themselves. Your library has three sections: Assets for the files you have uploaded and kept, Notes for standing instructions that apply whatever you are working on, and Templates. New template opens an empty title with an empty box under it. Paste the request in, name it, save. Name it after the job rather than the feature, because the name is what you go looking for later: "Monday shorts" finds itself, "video template" does not.

Then read what you pasted and strip out this week's facts. The link, the episode number, the guest's name, the file you happened to attach. Those change every run, and leaving them in means the template quietly argues with whatever you actually gave it. What stays is every decision you would make the same way next time.

Keeping one requires an account. Without one the ready-made templates still come up in a chat and you can read any of them in full, but there is nowhere to put your own, and sending asks you to sign in first. Whatever you had ready is held while you do that and goes through afterwards.

What happens when you apply one

Type a forward slash in the message box, at the start of a line or after a space. Your own templates come up first, the ready-made ones under them, and typing a few more letters narrows the list. Enter applies the one you have highlighted. There is also a menu next to the box, Add from library, which shows you the full text and a Use template button before anything is applied.

Then the part that surprises people. The message box stays empty.

Applying a template does not type it into your message. It arrives as a small tab above the box carrying its name, with a line underneath saying what it does if it is one of the ready-made ones. The box tints behind it, and the faint text inside it changes to "Write a message, attach a file, or just send." Click the tab to read the whole thing. The words themselves get picked up when you hit send, not before, which is why you never see them in front of you.

The empty box is the useful part. Whatever you type goes alongside the template rather than into it. The template holds the decisions that do not change. Your message holds this week's: "Episode 41 is attached, the guest is Priya Raman, skip the first eight minutes." Send with nothing typed at all and the template goes on its own, which is what you want when the files are attached and nothing else is different.

After it sends, the message keeps the template's name on it, and opening that shows the exact text that ran. Rewrite the template next month and the old messages still show what they actually used.

What separates one that holds up from a paragraph you saved

You can read the answer directly, because the ready-made templates open in full rather than as a summary. Four things keep showing up in them, and none of the four is about video.

Numbers where an adjective would do. "Short" is not an instruction. Article To Reel, which turns a piece of writing into a vertical video for a phone feed, asks for forty-five to sixty seconds and then converts that into the number that actually gets written, roughly 120 to 160 words at a natural speaking pace. It also caps how long one image may sit on screen at three or four seconds, on the reasoning that short video rewards visual change. Thumbnails, which makes the still image someone sees before deciding to click, asks for 1280 by 720, three or four words of text, never more than six, because that text has to survive being looked at on a phone at about the size of a fingernail. Clean Audio, which is not a video job at all, cuts any pause longer than about seven hundred milliseconds down to roughly three hundred and leaves the natural breaths.

What to do when the inputs are wrong. This is the line that saves the most time and the one almost nobody writes. Rough Cut From Footage says that if nothing was attached, or only a single short clip, stop and ask for the source material rather than assembling a cut out of nothing. Article To Reel says that if all it received was a topic, or a link it could not open, ask for the actual text and do not write the video from general knowledge of the subject. Without a line like that, a thin request still produces a confident file, and you find out at the end.

The things you specifically do not want. Bans are cheap to write and they hold up well, because the ways a job goes wrong are more stable than the job. Article To Reel forbids closing on "thanks for watching." Short Form Repurpose forbids dropping a wide video into a tall frame with black bars above and below, which it calls the most obvious sign of a lazy repurpose. Subtitles rules out rainbow effects and bouncing letters, then allows a single accent color on one keyword per cue, a cue being the few words standing on screen at any one moment. Whatever you have corrected twice is the ban you are missing.

Which rule beats the others. Twenty rules of equal weight get treated as twenty rules of equal weight. Subtitles finishes by saying that every caption must land on the word being spoken, and that font, color, placement and animation are a distant second to timing. Article To Reel says the opening line decides whether any of the rest gets watched, and to spend more time on that one line than on anything else in the script. Explainer Video picks one thing and derives everything else from it: write the narration first, then let every visual, transition and piece of timing follow it rather than the other way round. A sentence like that is what a template has instead of you standing over the work.

Those four are about how the instruction is written. The fifth is about what you ask to get back, and it is the one that compounds. Ask for the reasoning next to the file. Rough Cut From Footage hands back a list of the clips it rejected and why, alongside the cut. Short Form Repurpose gives one sentence per clip on why that moment was picked. Thumbnails gives one sentence per option on what it is betting will make somebody stop scrolling. That list is what lets you argue with a specific choice instead of vaguely sensing the whole thing is off, and after a few runs it teaches you what to ask for. "Pick moments like the second one from last time" is only a sentence you can say if something told you what the second one was.

Pin down the delivery while you are there. Subtitles names both of the files it hands back, the captioned video and an SRT, the separate caption file a platform reads off, so you never finish a run holding one when the place you are publishing to wanted the other. Same instinct, smaller: ask for the files to be named after their contents. In a month, the-rejection-rule.mp4 is findable and clip_3.mp4 is not.

Taking one of the ready-made ones apart

They open read-only, so nothing you do in there can break them, and reading one end to end is worth doing even if you never apply it. They are named for their jobs, so Rough Cut From Footage is the one that turns a folder of raw clips into a first edit.

Save a copy puts an editable version in your own list. From there it is yours: cut the parts that do not apply to you, replace the numbers with your numbers, add the ban you keep having to type by hand. Two thirds someone else's and one third yours is a much better place to start than an empty editor.

Read them for the shape even when the subject is wrong. The reason that one works is not that it knows about footage. It decides nothing until it has been through every clip and written down what is in each, the same inventory you get by asking a long file where things happen. It marks the unusable ones explicitly instead of quietly dropping them. And it holds the music back on the first pass, because music papers over weak edits and makes the cut harder for you to judge. Three moves that transfer to anything you would write down.

When the template should bring its own files

Some jobs arrive with the same files every time. The logo, the two-second intro, the music bed, the show's cover art.

A template can carry them. The template editor has an Include asset button that pulls from the Assets you have saved, and on send those files arrive attached to the message alongside anything you attached yourself. That is the difference between a template that costs one keystroke and one that costs a keystroke plus another trip through your folders to find the logo.

Where a template stops helping

One per message. A message can carry several files but only one template, so "clip it and thumbnail it" has to be written as a single instruction rather than two stapled together.

You cannot edit the words from the chat. The preview only shows them and the box underneath will not take them, so there is nothing to type over. A one-off change gets written alongside the template. A permanent one gets made in the library and applies from your next send.

A template does not carry context between chats. It is the same words every time, which is the point. If the thing you keep repeating is true of every job rather than one job, it wants to be a note instead, which is the other kind of text the library holds: brand colors, the fonts you use, the export settings a client insists on. Those get drawn on in any conversation without you applying anything. A template is for the job you run again. A note is for what is true regardless of the job.

And it does not fix a job that is different every time. If the request genuinely changes on every run, keep typing it. The test is not whether the work looks similar week to week. It is whether you would write the same sentences.

Write it while you still have the words

The moment to write one is not now. It is the next time something comes back right, because that is the only moment you still have the exact wording that produced it, sitting there in the thread above the file.

Copy the message before you close the tab. Name it after the job. Monday stops being a memory test.