How to deal with defaulting of mandatory fields from templates?

We have a generic document class (lets call it "Primary document") which has a few mandatory fields:

Date

Activity (lookup list) 

when we create a template for this class we're forced to enter a date and Activity. 

however when creating a document from this template we want these fields to be blank so that the user has to choose the correct values.

any suggestions on how we can achieve? 

tried using the metadata card config to make the fields non-mandatory if Is Template is set to yes but that doesn't seem to work. 

thanks