These five tools will improve your work in no time. Game Designers and Product managers should check them out.
Scrivener
Scrivener is the only tool I can recommend for writers of all kind. It is even more valuable when writing technical documents like game design documents (GDD).
Its core feature is to break down documents in any way you need and move those parts around. This feature makes manage and rearrange the GDD an easy task. You can tag each section, add keywords or label it. That way, you can quickly see which part of your design is in a draft stage, or ready to share with others.
I will write a separate post about Scrivener and provide a link to a template I've created over the years.
Evernote
I use the Evernote clip so many time every day. It's a browser plugin that allows you to capture pages and articles. It's a powerful tool that will enable you to grab the information in various forms and send it to the specific folder you need. The plugin also looks at your searches and suggest related articles from your private database.
Drafts
Draft is a mobile app that makes the process of capturing information a no-brainer. Its primary objective is to allow you to type or paste into it a snippet of information and deal with it later. You don't have to think of what you are writing needs to go to a to do, or a file, or Evernote. You just capture it and later, when you get the time, you can use it in any way you need - its sharing and integrations are insane.
OmniFocus
There are many beautiful and simple todo lists apps. I tried many of them, and I keep getting back to OmniFocus. The main reason is that while it has a high learning curve, once you know how to use it, you can customize it to fit your needs.
My todo system is based on the Getting Things Done, and the Most Important Tasks methods - OmniFocus allows me to tailor it to this perfectly.
Google Spreadsheet
No way to get around this. Product people don't have a better tool to manage content and features. I will write a separate post about the sheets I've created (and share templates) - in general, I have three main sheets I use to manage the work:
Index, which lists all the documents and spreadsheets we have and links to them
Features, which breaks down the features and the release version and dates
Master leveling chart, which is a name for the chart that shows the progression of the game (character leveling, or progression of levels in the game, etc.)
Again, a separate post for each will be added soon.
What are your favorite tools for working on your games?