Tips on mastering the skill of creating high quality Google Docs?

Question

Say you want to research on a topic for resolving an issue and want to share with the team by creating a Google Doc. How does one master the skill of creating an high quality Doc?

My Senior team member, top performer, is super solid at creating Google Docs and churns out one great doc almost every week. He said he just focuses on just dumping out the thoughts in the first go and fixes them later on. But I feel his velocity in getting that doc out or completely the research on it is very fast. So clearly there is something that I am not understanding.

So I am looking for opinions from experts on Taro :)

Jordan Cutler · Accepted Answer

I love this question!

TL;DR - There are many different approaches. Pick the one that works the best for you. One approach I recommend is the following 2 step approach:

Ask yourself who your audience is and how that affects what content you write and how you write it
Ask yourself what is the one concept or takeaway you want your readers to get. Emphasize that, and divide into sections that further help the reader grasp that takeaway.

More things to do to help you achieve your desired outcome:

The person you are working with likely has their own methods. Consider asking if you can shadow or work on a doc with them to learn from how they do it. You can also continuously try to pick up any patterns just from reading the docs they write.
Ask them for mentorship on a doc you are writing so they can tell you what you may be doing wrong or could be doing better.
Follow formats or pull from formats you like in other articles. Here is a few I have saved up:
- https://dondo.org/2022/02/18/on-writing-documents/
  
  https://laurensperber.com/2016/02/25/presentation-building-software-at-etsy/
  
  https://about.gitlab.com/direction/
  
  https://rinaarts.com/how-to-write-an-effective-design-document/
  
  https://adr.github.io/
  
  https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-engineering-teams-via-writing-things-down-rfcs/
  
  https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/my-favorite-templates-issue-37?s=r

I hope this helps!

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn for more advice like this to a broader audience: www.linkedin.com/comm/mynetwork/discovery-see-all?usecase=PEOPLE_FOLLOWS&followMember=jordancutler1

Tips on mastering the skill of creating high quality Google Docs?

Discussion