5 scary-useful templates for everyday work

From project management to goal setting, use these frameworks to elevate your daily workflow — Halloween-themed, but ready to use all year round.

Brian Klein

Social Media Manager at Coda

5 scary-useful templates for everyday work

By Brian Klein

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Productivity · 5 min read
Say what you will about scary movies, but whether it’s a meta-horror series or a gripping psychological thriller, they all share fundamental elements like isolation, the unknown, vulnerable characters, and unexpected twists. A similar plot line can be found when it comes to scaling the world of docs. At it’s scariest, and without the bones of a strong workspace tool, information can easily get isolated, there’s a fear of the doc unknown creeping around every click and cranny, and you feel vulnerable in both your edits and starting from scratch. Before you know it, you’re living in a disorganized horror story of your own making. Good news! Coda unites your favorite day-to-day tools like docs, spreadsheets, apps, and even AI into a single workspace to make it easier than ever to project plan, brainstorm, and track meeting notes. On top of that, you can customize your workspace and docs to work with your teams without the worry of unexpected layout twists tangling up the next steps and decision-making. In honor of spooky season, we’ve put together 5 template skeletons to help jumpstart your workday all year round.

1. Not your Blair Witch Project tracker.

Keep your team moving in the right direction with a scalable, flexible tracking system that organizes your team’s projects, milestones, and daily check-ins in one, interactive doc. With this bare-bones project template, teams can connect table views that sync and update everyone at once, making all your project details come together. How to use it: Start building your projects—big and small—by adding in the details and descriptions, with specific tasks assigned to specific team members. Based on the owner’s task status, the doc will automatically update the progress based on the status, ensuring that actions are consistently advancing toward completion.
Get the project tracker template

2. Conjuring up meeting agendas and notes.

Ever finished a productive meeting only to have everyone’s notes all over the place? Or, jumped into a meeting that clearly could have been an email? Now that’s a horror story. Our meeting agenda template helps kick off meetings and keeps the conversation going with informative notes that drive action after the fact. Plus, Coda offers over 500+ integrations, including Zoom Pack, which seamlessly connects meetings and transcripts into collaborative docs, creates a visual component to Zoom Whiteboard, automates notifications, and more. How to use it: With this template, attendees can quickly write down their agenda points, add notes in real time during the call, assign next steps, and mark them completed—all in one place.
Get the meeting agenda template

3. What Lies Beneath the executive summary.

When it comes to overall business assessments and hitting company goals, having a more detailed account of your OKR progress goes a long way. No spooky surprises here. The Executive Summary template helps to centralize your most up-to-date information so you can easily track priorities and performances across a team or an entire organization. How to use it: To best utilize the features of this template, simply start inputting objectives, output metrics, and key results connected to specific teams or projects. The dashboard also lets you add detailed updates and indicate progress with a slider to help keep your leadership team up to date on the latest metrics.
Get the executive summary template

4. Get Out...your SWOT assessment.

Every team possesses its own set of experiences, skills, strengths, and assets. The SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) assessment template is a ritual-based doc that helps ignite those superpowers and amplify your team’s collaborative muscle on specific project. How to use it: Invite your team to a meeting-of-the-minds brainstorm around a project, a business strategy, a marketing idea, etc. Once you start the timer, give everyone time to add their sentiments based on their SWOT thoughts. Allow extra time to upvote or react to responses. Then use the remainder of the meeting time to initiate discussion around the SWOTs that received the most votes.
Get the SWOT assessment template

5. Keep your goal-setting Shining.

Unlock your potential with our intuitive goal-setting template designed to streamline your planning process. This template takes a creative approach to fostering collaboration and making goal-setting moments thrilling (the good kind). With sections for implementing ideas and Monopoly-style incentives, you and your team can break free from monotonous back-and-forth and go straight to making decisions. How to use it: At Coda, we like to refer to this template as “$100 voting,” and it’s a tried-and-true method for enhancing decision-making and spotlighting priorities (like in terms of annual and quarterly planning). Here’s how it works. Each meeting participant is allocated $100 in symbolic funds to invest in the ideas or projects they find the most promising. This approach ranks the ideas based on total investments, revealing team members’ priorities and accelerating decisions that align with the team’s goals.
Get the goal-setting template

Cut out the project suspense with Coda.

 There’s nothing scary about creating a new doc in Coda, especially when you have hundreds of templates at your fingertips guiding you to a more productive, efficient workspace. And the best part about these templates is that they’re just the starting point. You can customize the doc to fit your own needs—add formulas (to filter out or highlight specific data, personalize your doc, etc.), create automations, integrate Packs, and so much more. Get started with these templates or explore more in our Gallery. If you want to customize a template or need some guidance on enhancing your Coda experience, connect with one of our teams. We’d love to help!
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