(2020-01-08) Eliason Roam Why I Love It And How I Use It

Nat Eliason: Roam - Why I Love It and How I Use It. I’ve been deeply interested in personal knowledge management for almost 10 years now

*V1 of my interest was a private wiki I created in college to help organize the notes I started taking from non-fiction books I was reading.

V2 was a sort of hacky combination of Evernote and Google Docs. It worked fine, but there was no structure, and it just got me out of the very janky wiki setup.

V3 happened when I discovered Tiago Forte, and implemented his Second Brain ideas into my Evernote setup.

V3 was special. It was the first time a digital architecture changed how I consumed information. When I look back on my kindle highlights pre-BASB, they’re dramatically different from my book highlights now. I now read with a mind towards synthesis and distillation, where the idea of reading something without taking notes from it seems absurd.*

Roam is V4.

Why Roam? Big Reasons

Siloed vs. Fluid Information Structure

In Evernote, Notion, and most note taking tools, your information lives in a hierarchy

Easy Links & Page Creation

In most note taking apps, you need a reason to make a page. In Roam you don’t. You can make new pages constantly, and since you don’t need to file or do anything with them there’s nothing stopping you from making pages as placeholders to tie information together

In Roam, notes live nowhere and everywhere

That doesn’t mean you can’t create hierarchies, though

This also highlights a big difference between Roam and other note taking tools: tags are both everything and nothing. Every page is a tag, and every tag is a page

Bidirectional Linking

But it gets better: Roam also shows me all the UNlinked references to Mindfulness. Everytime the word “mindfulness” shows up on any other page, but isn’t linked to this page:

The references also have a really robust filtering tool. For example, I could filter all the references to Mindfulness to only include pages that also reference Books:

Almost everything you type naturally lends itself to be linked to other topics in your database, and you constantly discover new opportunities to interlink your information.

The more I do this, the more I want to find connections between everything in my life. I link articles to people, people to places, places to ideas, it keeps growing, and it keeps spitting out new relationships I hadn’t thought of or had forgotten about.

Limitations of Roam

No Aliases

Some Scaling Issues

No API

No Mobile App

Getting Started with Roam

for each week, I create a “weekly plan” with some goals for the week, with specific goals for each day broken out:

I’ve adapted Tiago’s PARA system to Roam by removing the Resources and Archive sections (you really don’t need them in Roam), and adding a section for Short and Long Term goals

I wasn’t sure at first that I’d be able to use it as a tool for personal productivity, but now that I’ve adapted to it I really love it

Roam has turned into my “staging ground” for new things I create

As I capture information in Roam, I’ll slowly work on cleaning it up and connecting it to other pages in Roam

Alternatively, if I’m capturing more extensive notes from something I’ll just create a page for it.

Most of my capture in Roam goes straight into the Daily Note. It’s an easy jumping off point

How I’m Using Roam as a Second Brain

Since you start in the Daily Notes, every day becomes its own page and you can “pre-create” those pages with the Date Picker. So when I have a thought about something on a future day, or want to assign a to-do for myself for the future, I can just tag that date.

Roam also has this “graph overview” you can use to get a visual sense of how all your pages are interlinked.

I’ve never been able to stick with keeping a journal. But with Roam’s setup encouraging you to start your day in the Daily Note, you end up naturally creating a journal just by adding information and recording things that are going on. (Daily Writing)

This is incredibly useful for jumping around between different notes without having to open tons of tabs or go back and forth constantly.

Roam lets you work on one main note and then open another note in the sidebar just by shift-clicking a link