Not to be confused with doing less well. This is a short post about software that does just what it’s supposed to.

I have a lot of items in Things 3. Over the years, I’ve been frustrated by its lack of one feature or another and played with alternatives. But I keep coming back to Things. Today I realized that it’s because Things does a few jobs quite well that are important to me:

• It has a quick entry dialogue, so I can make a new task with a key-command
• Without clicking, it lets me assign that task to a future date by typing a few words
• It’s totally beautiful
• It’s fast

Those are the core things I need from my to-do list. And what it lacks hasn’t been enough to offset how well it does what I really care about.

I think this may be the case for Simplenote users. My team at Automattic maintains Simplenote, and it has a lot of users active every month. I’ve wondered: Why don’t these users move to one of our many competitors? Apple Notes, One Note, Notion, Craft, Evernote, Roam Research… the list goes on. Those tools each have better, fancier features that Simplenote doesn’t and won’t compete with.

Perhaps it’s because Simplenote is simple. There isn’t too much to do except write, and read what was written. It’s about text notes.