" I find most of the connect-y, conference-circuit-y, business-socializing stuff to be vacuous, painfully false and a waste of time."

"I put it in my calendar, weekly, as the first thing to do each week. It’s a good way to start a new work-week. While most of the population rushes to the jobs thinking “It’s @#$%@#$ Monday again”, I start the week slower, walking the streets or sitting on a park bench or under a tree to write things down, breathing real air. If the weather doesn’t allow being outside, I’ll sometimes go to a cafe, instead of skipping it completely."

"I think that people’s emotional connection to our products is that they sense our care, and the amount of work that has gone into creating it."

"I recently deleted Things for Mac and Things for iPhone. It wasn’t because of the recent squabbles among productivity nerds about Things vs. Omnifocus. It was because of a book called The Shallows. It’s bringing me back to paper."

"Here's an overlooked truth: until quite recently, buying something for the first time was a very rare and almost revolutionary act. In fact, more than a billion people on Earth don't do this as a matter of course. The standard is to only purchase the seeds, fuel or shelter that your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did. That's the way it's always been."

"What I like about Ben Franklin’s daily schedule was how open it was. It was a rigid routine but it was very forgiving for all the nuances and variables that each day’s tasks and priorities seem to bring."

"Many of HTML’s original cowpaths were paved by writers and editors, long before the web arrived. Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you."

"More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community."

"By coalescing around one service I now have a known quantity. I can make sure that the tools I need to backup my data are simple. Which is what I am now doing. I am in the process of building a local/cloud hybrid. Because I think that storing interesting articles from the internet before the get removed from the internet for any number of reasons is the best way to build up a library for which to build intellectual arguments. And, I just like the idea if preserving knowledge."

"I’m a writer. Speaking, for me, is a form of Resistance."

"Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them."

"Finally, late in my reporting, I got word back-channeled to me from another Salt Lake City programmer: Jonathan is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone."