Choosing the Best Writing Tool for the Job

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe,” the famous quote goes. But these days we have a wide variety of axes and tools to choose from. As PMs and Product Leaders, a big part of our role is communicating — specifically in writing. On any given day, we’re addressing multiple audiences with vastly differing goals. We are expected to bring clarity, paint a vision or sometimes simply share boring facts to help drive a decision.

To communicate for maximum impact with the least effort, we have many tools to choose from: starting with simple markdown editors, all the way to office suites optimized for sharing & collaboration. Have you ever spent more than a few minutes agonizing over this decision, when you should have been typing away in your flow instead? I have… In fact, I have spent so much time trying to optimize my tool choices that I can even share it with you:

Note that while this is based on the Microsoft stack (I wonder why), the reasoning applies equally well if you replace it with your tools of choice (e.g. Confluence instead of ADO Wiki, Google Docs instead of Word and so on). Hopefully, this thought process saves you some time. Go get that Shitty First Draft out faster and go spend more time on doing higher Leverage work!

I’m keen to hear your thoughts and feedback. Am I missing something? Would you do something differently? Post in the comments or connect with me on LinkedIn or X-not-Twitter.

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