About a year ago I started experimenting with the idea of a daily journal. From someone within the Roam community, I heard about the concept of Morning Pages, which is a tool for creative writers to build a muscle for generating ideas. Author Julia Cameron defined it in her book The Artistās Way:
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pagesāthey are not high art. They are not even āwriting.ā They are about anything and everything that crosses your mindā and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the pageā¦ and then do three more pages tomorrow.
Freeform journaling is something I used to do years ago with Day One, but not with a longer free space to ruminate. I mostly used that to document personal events, versus thoughts and ideas. My methodology with Morning Pages has been even more loose than as Cameron defines it. I donāt necessarily get my journaling done in the morning; I just have a goal to do it sometime once per day. The first-thing-in-the-morning writing sessions are definitely the most creative and interesting, but my plan collides with reality and makes it hard to do consistently. The only constraint I set are to write for at least 15 minutes, but my default timer is 25 (more on that in a minute). No topic is off-limits. Often Iāll take some event that happened the previous day and riff on it, or take from something I recently read or a podcast I listened to, or Iāll take a trigger off of something from my Writing Ideas page and expand on existing ideas.
The Artistās Wayās canonical method is to write longhand, which I agree affords a benefit in mental stimulation that isnāt the same as typing. Iāve experimented a little bit with this and itās alright ā definitely good for the focus and flexibility. Because you donāt need a computer or tablet, you can write anywhere youāve got paper, and you donāt need access to a particular application. But there are too many advantages to journaling digitally to use the analog method, for me. The key determinant for whether analog or digital is better is: _which one will get you to journal more regularly? Or more deeply?
My tool of choice these days, and for the past 6 months or so, is Logseq, a networked note-taking tool thatās gotten popular in the tools-for-thought space. Itās essentially an open source Roam look-a-like, with a sprinkling of unique aspects.
But the tool itself is irrelevant beyond the fact that I write my journal entries digitally, and that the graph-based model makes for some interesting additional features for the journaling flow.
Logseq has built-in āJournalsā ā a function that auto-generates a new date-stamped page for each day (like Roamās Daily Notes). I use the dayās journal for any running activities for the day, things like a scratchpad for meeting notes, reflections on my daily Readwise highlights, general passing thoughts, todos, and my Morning Pages.
I start by creating a block called [[Morning Pages]] and nest the journal entry as blocks underneath. Because thatās a link and a page itself, I can go to the Morning Pages page and see a list of every entry in the linked references. Iāll also add a word count at the top block so I can see my progress. My favorite thing about writing in a zettelkasten-style system like this is the ability to link from within my journaling to other ideas in my notes library.
Then I just write. Sometimes not even in full sentences. And without fail, every time I wall off the time to do this, with no commitments on word counts or topics or boundaries, I can pour out a thousand words easily. My daily average word count is in the 500-1000 words range, but some entries really spark the brain and go close to 1500. Since mid-August Iāve written around 14,000 words in journal entries, and it doesnāt even feel that hard. Mixing in the personal stuff also leaves a nice trail of my thinking about family life and what we were doing each day that I enjoy going back and looking at later. Seeing my old entries in Day One from 7 or 8 years ago is always enjoyable. Iād love to look back in years and have a daily record of my stream of consciousness.
If a note is an idea, we want to make the idea as atomic as possible, so we can find and stitch them together into an interconnected web of ideas. We want composable building blocks.
Composability helps us stack, mix, and repurpose ideas. To correlate them and find the relationships between them. Prose is an excellent medium for consumption, for diving deep on a particular topic. But with a prose format for documenting ideas (through notes), itās harder to relate shared ideas across domains. Prose makes ideas easy to expand on and consume, but difficult to decompose into reusable parts. Decompose too far, though, say into individual words and letters, and the information is meaningless. We want a middle ground that can effectively convey ideas, but is also atomic enough to be decomposed and reused. We want idea Legos.
In Self-Organizing Ideas, Gordon Brander contrasts the linear, difficult to break down expansiveness of prose with something more like an index card. With index card-level division, ideas can now be expounded on at the atomic level, but also cross-referenced and remixed more easily than long-form prose. With the Zettelkasten, Luhmann devised a system of just that: numbered index cards that could reference one another. If you use a system like this for note taking, itās a fun exercise to actually take a batch of 3-5 permanent notes at random and look for relationships. When Iāve done this, pulling out 2 arbitrary permanent notes, it often sparks new thoughts on them, and in the best cases, entirely new atomic notes.
Within our knowledge systems, we should strive for that right altitude of scope for a particular note or idea. Andy Matuschak says āevergreen notes should be atomic.ā In my system, I make atomic notes that are concept-based, with a declarative format that prompts me to keep the note focused around a specific idea. Just scrolling through the list now, I see ones like:
āTraditions are storehouses of trial and errorā
āNovelty in startups is higher than predictedā
āKnowledge is the biggest constraint in product managementā
With a format like this, each note is structured as a claim or idea, so itās densely linkable inline within other notes. So when reading a note, the cross-link to another idea can appear seamlessly within the text. Using a concept-based approach, we might find serendipitous connections we werenāt looking for. Andy says:
If we read two books about exactly the same topic, we might easily link our notes about those two together. But novel connections tend to appear where theyāre not quite so expected. When arranging notes by concept, you may make surprising links between ideas that came up in very different books. You might never have noticed that those books were related beforeāand indeed, they might not have been, except for this one point.
Novel ideas spring from concocting new recipes from existing ideas. Composable, atomic ideas make it more manageable to toss several disparate ones together to experiment with new combinations.
Gordon has been writing lately about his work on Subconscious, and the possibility of software-assisted self organization of ideas. This is a super intriguing idea, and exactly the sort of reason Iām interest in computers and software ā for their ability to help us think more creatively, do more building, and less rote information-shuffling.
For years Todoist was my tool of choice for task management. When Roam came on the scene for me earlier this year, Iād seen pretty compelling methods from the #roamcult for how to manage todos inside of Roam with its TODO feature. It was an intriguing idea: such a fast and simple way to capture things without leaving the current frame.
But it took me a while to go all-in on Roam for tasks. Todoist was so embedded in my muscle memory, especially with its accessible web and cross-platform mobile apps and its excellent quick-entry āQuick Addā flow from the desktop. It was going to require a lot to make the switch to a different system, and one thatās wildly different from the way any other task management app works.
I eventually took the plunge, moved all my pending tasks over to a Roam page from Todoist, and started to come up with a process. I was first just managing tasks from a giant temporary āInboxā page, but over time I learned better how I wanted to fit them in with the advantages of a Roam-based daily workflow.
Though the switch to Roam for task management gives up some useful abilities with dedicated favorites like Todoist or Things, the gains with managing tasks alongside the rest of my knowledge graph are well worth the trade-offs. Most task management tools have way too many features for my needs, anyway. Here are just a few things I love about this process so far:
You can insert todos in context ā Being able to quickly slot todos anywhere is beautiful. As youāre writing other notes specific to projects, meetings, phone calls, articles, or anything else, you can Cmd-Enter and add something right as youāre thinking of it. This method ends up being a solid āubiquitous captureā flow similar to what youād do with Todoist or OmniFocus inboxes.
The [[TODO]] page, pinned to the sidebar ā This lets you quickly dredge up all of your todos regardless of where you scattered them. Use this plus filters to drill in to specific areas. A solid āinboxā equivalent to process your todos into other places.
Add tags to filter for context ā If youāre familiar with [GTDās contexts](https://evomend.net/en/what-not-gtd-context/ āContexts in), youāll recognize this. I add tags to tasks so I can filter for all [[TODO]] tagged #Email, for example.
Now letās go over how I plan out my week with Roam.
My Weekly Process
At the beginning of each week, I start out by creating a new page for the week ahead, dated starting on Mondays. So this weekās page is [[š Weekly Plan: 2020/11/02]]. I just focus into the search bar and type it out.
For the page template I start out with sections for Weekly Goals and Daily Goals. The first I treat like a general holding area for tasks I want to work on in the upcoming week, and the latter I include a block for each day. Then I manually add in the dates for each day with Roamās /date picker slash command (/today and /tomorrow can also be useful here, if relevant)1. To make all of this faster, I use a TextExpander snippet to automatically insert the basics. Typing rcwp stamps in my basic template2:
When I started down this workflow path, I initially thought itād be annoying to have to set up a new page each week. But so far itās actually been valuable to force a start-of-week planning session to think through what I want to get done. Usually on Sunday nights Iāll go in and make the Weekly Plan page, then pull up my [[Projects]] page, [[Blog Ideas]], [[TODO]], or even my page from the previous week to look for all of the various tasks I might want to focus on.
Using the sidebar helps a lot here. Iāll pop open other pages with a Shift-click, then drag over todos I want to work on under the Weekly Goals section. If I want the todo to actually stay where it is and not move it to the Weekly Plan page, I use Roamās Alt-click and drag to bring over a block reference instead of the entire block itself. This is a neat way to keep todos in the right place, but have a reference to them in your task plan. Thereās an example of this in the video below, where Iāve got a trip planning project page with tasks on it that I want to stay there, but still see in my weekly view.
Once Iāve got a batch of tasks entered under the week, Iāll start queueing them up into their appropriate days. Some things have deadlines or due dates Iām trying to manage to, so need to get done at specific times. Others Iāll just leave in the Weekly section until I know when I plan to do it. Regularly on weekday mornings Iāll go to my plan and pull in what I want to get done that day. Itās a living document until the week is over, a part of my morning routine to go to this page.
My favorite thing about this process is how it manifests your tasks on the Daily Notes page. Because the Daily Note automatically displays references to any page that includes that dayās date, you get a slick little embedded list of the dayās tasks. The Daily Notes view is my default working mode during a typical work day, so this is an excellent place to have all of those queued up activities available on the same page where Iām taking meeting notes and the like.
Areas for Improvement
After about 2 months committed to this process, itās pretty solid for me. Iām not missing as much from my old workflow as I thought I would, and Iām enjoying the benefits of Roamās graph structure too much to reconsider now. Plus the potential is high that the lightning-fast Roam team will add improvements to all this.
Todoistās Quick Add is something Iād love an equivalent for somehow in Roam. The Capture mobile entry web app that Roam has isnāt bad, but itās not that fast for adding new items quickly while on the go. To fill in this gap now Iāll usually just throw things into a sheet in Drafts which gets processed later back at my desk.
Multiplayer abilities were something I never took advantage of in Todoist, but are a key piece of any work (or even family) project management usage. Roamās recent additions in support of multiplayer look promising here, but that hasnāt been relevant to me just yet. Multiuser project management (that tools like Asana excel at) is a beast in itself to solve.
Managing dates isnāt as smooth as in most task management apps, but there are some advantages I really do like. For any task entered anywhere in your graph, you can add a future date to it and have it magically appear in Daily Notes references that day to jog your memory. A feature that no task management tool other than OmniFocus ever supported, but Iāve wanted ever since, is the idea of a Start Date. With that you could put in something you want to remember, but for later, put āin 90 daysā next to it and it would disappear until resurfacing then. It was a great way to put in things you know you needed to remember, but donāt need to continue seeing in your list for weeks until itās relevant. Dating your todos like the above is similar in concept: tagging them with a date 3 months out will make them pop back up when they need to be considered.
The Future
From what Iāve seen in Twitter discussions about the incoming Roam API, Iām hopeful that its hyperactive developer community will jump right into building applications on Roam for workflows like this. A dedicated, customizable app specifically for task management built on the āRoam platformā would be a phenomenal tool worthy of driving its own second-order revenue for a developer. Thinking about David Crandallās piece on the prospects of Roam as a service layer, thereās so much potential for it to power its own developer marketplace.
In the next post Iāll go over my current workflow for using Daily Notes. Itās an interesting companion to this process of task management.
I just finished publishing my summary and takeaways from Marty Caganās Inspired, his collection of ideas on building product teams. A lot of solid fundamentals there for startups, more meat on the bone in this one than most business books of its ilk.
Iām gradually working back through book highlights and building out literature notes, which Iād also one day like to get published in full somehow. Iām thinking about how I can do that while preserving some of the interlinking in my Roam graph, and publishing some of those evergreen notes, as well.
If I tracked my time spent in software tools, Iām pretty sure over the last 8 months Roam and Readwise would be top of the list.
All of my writing, note-taking, idea logs, and (increasingly) to-dos happen now in Roam. Since getting serious with it around the beginning of the quarantine, I havenāt used any other tool for writing things down.
I discovered Readwise about a year ago and it quickly entered routine use. My backlog of meticulously-kept-but-underused Kindle highlights was immediately made valuable through Readwiseās daily reviews. The ability to have my highlights deliver recurring value (compound interest!) has made more both more compelled to read and definitely more compelled to highlight and make notes.
One of the favorite uses Iāve discovered for Roam is to make literature notes from books. Iāll page back through a book after finishing it, review highlighted passages, and translate the key ideas and takeaways into a Roam note. The process takes a little time, but is well worth the effort for the resulting outcome. Paging back through usually turns into a light re-read or skim, not just reading the highlights but what also might be worth extracting adjacent to highlights that I didnāt include on the first read. I suppose this is similar to āprogressive summarization,ā but Iām not following a consistent process here, just doing what feels natural. When I recently went through How Innovation Works to build notes, it took 2-3 hours to translate the highlights into literature note form in my Roam graph. Then perhaps another 30 minutes to an hour to skim back over the notes to clean them up and add links to other pages.
Combining it all
All of these tools and processes make for a powerful system of study. Extracting and linking ideas between sources is fascinating so far as a means for concretely visualizing how ideas bridge between authors. And most importantly, it gives you a resource to mine for remixing source material into your own novel ideas.
A few weeks ago I got early access to Readwiseās latest big feature: direct integration with Roam. Even in beta after only a few weeks of usage, itās been an amazing addition to this workflow. Letās dive into how it works.
Readwise ā¢ Roam
First of all, itās great that this feature works with highlights from any object type. Books, articles, podcasts, and Twitter threads can all be included in your Roam sync, giving more power to Roam as a system-of-record for collected knowledge.
When you set up the sync the first time, you can select item by item what you want to sync into Roam. If you want something to resurface in Readwise, but donāt need or want it in Roam, you can exclude things to your liking. Since itās in beta, Iāve been selectively pulling in a few at a time each day just to go through them and see how they look on the Roam side (more on this step in a minute).
Highlights example page in Roam
Once your highlights are pushed over into Roam, Readwise publishes a new page with (highlights) appended to the name, and includes a few metadata elements at the top that you can customize to your liking in the sync configuration. One of my favorite things is how it appends highlights under a new block named āHighlights synced by Readwise [[September 9th, 2020]]ā, which cleverly functions both as a historical record of when the highlights came in inside the page, but also shows up in your Daily Notes as a sort of log of your daily reading activity.
Over the past few weeks the Readwise team has already made some additions to the syncing options, including the ability to customize the metadata it uses (using Roam attributes, the :: method). The defaults have worked fine for me, but itās good to have this ability for future tweaks to the PKM process. Itāll also include links to the highlight location, which (in the case of Kindle) deep-link to the location in the Kindle app, or with podcasts (from Airr) to the AirrQuote you saved.
Readwise logs in Daily Notes
Another addition to this workflow Iāve been tinkering with is how to integrate these into the rest of my Roam knowledge graph. Every couple of days Iāve been scrolling back through each page of synced highlights and annotating them with bi-directional links to key terms, ideas, or other pages ā basically stitching them in with other content already in my Roam graph. Over time as I look back at previous evergreen notes or when Iām writing new pages, this will provide references at-hand for incorporating into new material in the knowledge graph. This has all the workings of a set of simple tools designed to do what Sƶnke Ahrens talked about at length in How to Take Smart Notes. Roam, Readwise, and Instapaper are working together to provide a slipstream for knowledge to enter the database, but in a living, breathing way (not just dumping notes into the archive).
The feature just publicly launched this week to all Readwise users, so itās still early. But so far this is an excellent addition to an already-excellent set of tools for personal knowledge management.
Matt Taibbi is always good for cutting to the chase.
Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that heās perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like āfascistā and āauthoritarian,ā nowhere near describe what he really is, and I donāt mean that as a compliment. Itās been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan heād leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.
One of my favorite evening activities is watching talks, interviews, and presentations on YouTube. I often take notes on these for myself, so this is an experiment in brushing up those notes and sharing them publicly.
In this 2016 talk, Joel Spolsky presented this talk called āThe History of Managementā as an internal training session at StackOverflow.
Corporate structure dynamics are fascinating. Groups of people have developed new and more effective ways of cooperating throughout history. We started out organizing ourselves in kinship-based tribal groups with spiritual myth-making to rationalize decisions, and have evolved into the likes of Amazonās expansive 100,000 person decentralized model or Appleās global functional org chart.
I like that I this talk Spolsky goes back to the beginnings of group organizing models. He covers this evolution in 6 broad phases:
Archaic
Magic
Impulsive
Conformist
Achievement
Pluralistic
Methods of organization and cooperation are technologies; once we discovered learning through trial and error (particularly through application of scientific methods), weāve continued adapting and modify them over time.
Most of the substance covers the last 3 stages, each of which youāll still find in operation today. Hereās the talk, followed by my notes below.
Notes
Just as with technological advancement, governance, and many other things, weāve moved through each new stage faster than its predecessor. Letās go through each stage and describe its time period and relevant details about what made it unique.
Archaic (100,000 ā 50,000 BC)
From an age before people could classify things
No specialization or division of labor
No hierarchy, elders, or chiefs
Bands capped out at a few dozen people
Magic (15,000 ā 0 BC)
People had no understanding of death
No ability to form abstract concepts
Still no specialization
Cause and effect was poorly understood ā wherever there was any attempt to understand, spirits and magic were attributed as causes
Tribes could grow up to several hundred
Impulsive (8,000 BC ā 1900 AD)
Might makes right ā power and control is derived from physical strength and dominance
The weak have to submit to authority
Leaders have a lack of awareness and empathy
No value placed on the individual or individualism
Black and white worldviews were dominant
Rewards and punishments well understood, but violence was commonplace (it was the primary means for asserting and proving your authority)
Ego and role differentiation ā meant we could differentiate roles and responsibilities, leads to some specialization
High levels of instability
The chief must:
Continually demonstrate power
Spread myths about absolute power
Surround self with family to insulate from challenges to power and control
Buy loyalty
Only keep incompetent aids and advisors ā if advisors are too capable, they could challenge authority
Examples
Failed states, places with no rule of law
Gangs
Mafia
TV and movie plotlines
The first three are obsolete ā you only really see them appear in movies, fiction, or history books. The final three are still in common existence today.
Conformist (4,000 BC ā present)
Huge advancement over āImpulsive (8,000 BC ā 1900 AD)ā systems
Examples: US Army, MTA, Catholic Church, East India Company
Defined by rigid, unchanging bureaucracy
Understand time as finite and linear
Cause and effect
Farming (plant now, eat later)
Caloric surplus
Surplus energy means we can do āextra stuffā ā administrators, craftsmen
Understanding other peopleās points of view
People will seek approval, leaders want approval from followers
Adopting group norms and conformism (us vs. them)
Fitting in requires self-discipline, canāt be all impulse
We develop moral codes assumed to be universal and immutable
Do right ā¢ earn rewards; do wrong ā¢ get punished
Values improving conditions within their suppliers
Eliminating wasteful packaging
Extraordinary working conditions provided for team and selves
Pluralism is not anarchy
Discarding hierarchy completely doesnāt work for any meaningful amount of time, or with large groups
Is there a relationship here with [[Dunbar number]] and how many people can collaborate in a group successfully?
Decentralization is a tactic deployed as much as possible to empower those local to a problem or project to identify those issues and formulate solutions
New technologies enable pluralistic management styles
Today Nat Eliason launched version 2 of his Effortless Output course for learning Roam.
This time around heās doing an interesting thing with live courses and students selecting a capstone project. Adding something that goes beyond the typical online video self-paced learning style of most tutorials is fascinating.
This is a course about creating something new, not just how to use Roam. Together weāll pick an area youāre interested in to explore as you develop your skills with Roam, and a final product you want to create with your newfound abilities.
For advanced learning of any sort of craft (and Iād call quality note-taking a craft, for sure), hands-on learning is the only way to go. Itās too easy to watch clips of someone else working, then get stuck with a āblank canvasā problem when you try to get started yourself.
Very interested to see how this works out! It could show some interesting results to help improve other online learning resources.
The Roam ecosystem is rapidly expanding these days. Itās on its way to becoming platform beyond personal knowledge management ā an operating system for ideas, thinking, knowledge synthesis, and writing.
Ramses Oudt and Francis Miller (creator of RoamBrain) put together a new learning newsletter with lessons on how to get the most out of Roam and its surrounding orbit of tools and add-ons.
YouTube creator Ali Abdaal put together a great extended overview video on Roam. Good examples of the core features of the product, and interesting techniques for how to organize notes.
Roam Research already has a deep community of users coalescing around it, building extensions, custom styles, and poking at the edges of how it could be extended.
In this post, David Crandall outlines some possibilities of what could be in Roamās future, breaking it out into various ideas at the presentation, service, and database layers. His diagram does a great job articulating what else could be possible with an open Roam API.
Roam's layers
Especially interesting to me:
Abilities to selectively expose pages from a graph to the public, for cross-linking to from othersā Roam graphs
Linking to blocks in public graphs (like literary works on RoamPublic)
Integrations with apps like David mentions ā Drafts, Zapier, Shortcuts
Jumping off from my Friday post on literature notes, Iāve taken the first step here in what will hopefully become something more meaningful over time.
I just finished up filtering back through all my highlights and notes on Matt Ridleyās How Innovation Works over the weekend. Part of what this process helped me figure out is a standard model for organizing literature notes by section, so if I publish the complete notes, theyāll be browsable by part and chapter of any book I have notes for.
All Iāve got up right now are Summary and Key Takeaways sections. Iām going to make myself put together both of these on any book with published notes, which will require deep thinking to distill the content of the book into a few paragraphs and bullet points. Again, I want to publish my key learnings here, not necessarily a complete synopsis or review. Reviews have a different place on the blog, and Iāll still be doing those separately from this.
I like this idea and think itās something Iāll enjoy doing. The forcing function of having to write sensible, consumable notes not just for myself, but for others should lead to better thinking. The effort to build coherent notes should be useful for others and create an archive I can openly reference in future writing. The long-term vision here is to eventually draw connections between books, making references between ideas for deeper insights. And if others learn something along the way from my effort, thatāll be fantastic.
If the work is in the open, itāll make it better and more polished, though polish isnāt a hard requirement. Iām just hopeful that others may find it useful.
āBut what about fiction books?ā you ask? Or books that are shallow, or simply not good? Thatās easy: no oneās making me go through this process for every book. Over time, if there are books in the library that have no published notes, that should speak their value and worthiness. I tend to have pretty discerning taste for what Iām willing to spend time on, so some books may get āreadā enough to determine they donāt need to be on the shelf. I do plan on making notes on fiction, but weāll see how that works out.
I have some other ideas in store for this later on. This is just a start.
With the last several books Iāve read, Iāve been trying to force myself to work through and document literature notes for my highlights, key ideas, and takeaways from books. Using a process (that perhaps Iāll one day go through in greater detail here) in Roam, Iāll scan through all of my highlights and write up notes on the content, editing it into my own words and phrasing. One of the goals of this process is to increase retention and recall, and as Sonke Ahrens suggests, itās best not to simply copy and paste highlighted text into a document.
With this flow, what typically happens is that Iāll only write a note for about 75% of what Iād originally highlighted, but also expand on some of them with additional thoughts. So for a book with roughly 200 highlights, I could end up with a Roam page of literature notes of, say, 250 or so blocks. Where relevant and possibly useful down the road, I also try and follow the threads to original sources and insert links to those, but not for everything. Wherever thereās specific data cited or something I find particularly worthy of a future read, Iāll capture it1.
Iāve been thinking about what I could do next with my Library to make it more useful and interesting. I want to find a way to publish my literature notes alongside or within those book pages. From the Library index page I could then mark which books have notes available and make them searchable and discoverable for anyone. This ties to a long-term goal I have to create a system for evergreen notes that could link between book notes and core ideas. Libraries of books are great, but what about one where you could quickly get access to the ideas within?
This is all experimental at this stage, but anecdote so far says I feel like I have a much deeper grasp on the material for which Iāve gone through this effort. If reading is for the purpose of building knowledge and retaining it, it should be well worth this up-front investment of time to get the payoff from all the reading I do. The next step is to incorporate the tactics of progressive summarization to enrich the literature notes and wire them in with other ideas. Being intentional about rediscovery and serendipitous resurfacing of information has been amazing at augmenting memory for me. Combining all of this with my regular use of Readwise makes reading such a more fulfilling experience.
The ādigital gardenā concept is gaining in popularity. Iāve seen a dozen of them recently, with groups like the Roam community taking to publishing their own open notebooks.
Maggie Appleton (an awesome, prolific member of the #roamcult) created this small library of resources for creating your own garden, along with several examples of others in the community. I still have the idea in my backlog of side projects to look at spinning up an open notebook like this.
Hereās Maggieās illustration of where the digital garden sits on the spectrum of content. All of her illustrations are excellent.
Lately Iāve been pouring time into Roam, finding ways to improve my long-term memory, and reading about taking notes, all in service of getting better at synthesizing new ideas.
Central to all of these is the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, a fancy-sounding German word for ānote box.ā
In addition to Sƶnke Ahrensās excellent book on the topic, this post offers a deeper look into the mechanics of the system.
In Sƶnke Ahrensās book How to Take Smart Notes he describes the āzettelkastenā system (the āslip boxā) developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann created the system to help himself organize notes and thoughts in a networked model rather than a structured hierarchy of folders. The zettelkasten system has a few elements to it to help model different types of notes, how and when you should write them, and how you associate ideas together.
The fundamental piece is the āpermanent note,ā one in which you develop your own model of an idea, linking it through associations to other information like quotes, citations, and clippings from other works ā but with the base attribute that you formulate it yourself in your own words (not a bunch of quotes pasted together).
Andy Matuschak calls these āevergreen notes,ā which I think is a better term to describe how they work. The intent with evergreen notes is that they arenāt ever declared finished, that you continue to flesh out and expand on the ideas therein as you learn more. Maybe you even learn revelatory things that change your deep thinking on the foundation of the idea. Evergreen is a better term, to me, than permanent because it implies a living document. Permanence implies completion.
Iāve been kicking around an idea on how I can convert and publish my evergreen notes from Roam as a public site somehow. Once ideas are substantive enough, I could publish them to the web. Any internal links to other evergreen ideas could link to those pages, and links to ideas not yet published could indicate future ideas Iām working on, but not yet ready for public consumption.
At the moment Iām thinking about how I could build this with minimal friction and augment this site with it. Some way that I can publish alongside the blog, but perhaps interlink content between the temporal stream of the blog format and the non-time-bound evergreen notes. As new ideas or additions are worked out to existing ideas, I want a small breadcrumb to appear in the blog feed showing what was updated and the nature of the change, making visible the evolution of ideas over time.
A neat concept demo from Dhrumil Shah showing possible enhancements for Roam Research. He calls them āRoam-Iā and āRoam-Eā:
Roam-I ā for reusing old knowledge
Roam-E ā collaboration
Most of this is user interface on top of the core technology that underpins how Roam works, but itās great to see people so passionate about this that theyāll spend this much time prototyping ideas on products they use.
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. Iāve written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how itās working for me so far.
What is it?
Roam is a tool for note-taking, described as a tool for ānetworked thought.ā With a glance on Twitter youāll find all sorts of comparison pieces to Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. Iāve tried all of those (Notion for quite a bit) and I find the experience of using Roam completely different.
Most applications for notes are both modal and hierarchical. When working on a text document, it lives in a folder with other related files. A half page of notes from a meeting has a specific place it should go. But because you donāt always want to deal with filing things logically, itās easy to end up with thoughts and ideas out of place, caught up and buried in meeting notes because thatās what you had open when a thought popped into your head (or even worse, arbitrary quick captured scratch docs you open once and are promptly disconnected from everything).
Roam solves this problem by destroying the top-down hierarchy of knowledge management tools. Instead of worrying about where to put a new document (Roam calls them āpagesā), you just make a new one anywhere. All pages are peers. Itās like a wiki in that way, but it feels more fluid, more natural and less mechanical. Making new pages is a matter of double-bracketing any word or phrase. With a quick piece of formatting which Roam autocompletes, [[Knowledge Management]] gets its own page, from which I can view the other Linked References. The Linked Reference is the secret weapon, a killer idea well-executed in Roamās simplistic but blazing fast interface. Each page also detects and shows āUnlinkedā references, places where a string appears without an explicit link.
I described it to someone through analogy to a CRM. Roam is a CRM for ideas: call it āIdea Relationship Management.ā Since Iāve been using it as a sort of productivity journal (Tiago Forte calls this the āsecond brain, living in it the whole work day. Itās like an operating system for managing information ā always on, always absorbing new data. And, like a real brain, linked reference synapses form between the information neurons.
The Graph
The idea graph is what breaks you free of organizational burden. The need to find where to put thinsg, once a point of friction in note-taking (that is, if you ever wanted to be able to find a piece of jotted information again) is gone, replaced by a new way to navigate your knowledge graph via organically produced links.
Hereās a scenario that happens all the time to me (and Iām sure others) that no other tool has handled well until now:
I walk into a product marketing meeting. During the meeting weāre going to solidify our messaging strategy and requirements for a new feature launch. I open up a new file for the meeting Product marketing sync ā 2020-04-13 or similar is a typical nomenclature. That file likely contains bullets and a series of messy individual lines related to things each person is going to do, topics people mentioned, action items for myself (which need to go elsewhere to have a prayer of being remembered). However, interspersed within the discussion I jot random thoughts on sometimes semi-related topics, but sometimes something completely off the reservation, that I still want to capture. During the marketing discussion I get an idea for a future blog post with a couple of topics. Where does that go?
Most commonly today the answer is ānowhereā and Iām lucky if I remember it again. In Roam I just type it in a āRandomā subsection in the bottom of my meeting notes. Who cares where it goes if I can link that by topic from elsewhere?
A quick tip: next to any random, non-sequitur thought like this, put #idea next to it. That then becomes its own page, with Linked References collecting up all the ideas dispersed through your graph.
I love that I can navigate to an abstract idea, like my page about āAntifragility,ā and find all of the articles, books, or other notes that connected with that idea. The ROI happens with Roam once you start rediscovering links or ideas you already noted without making the connection beforehand. Itās like stitching together threads that would have been previously in silos, invisible to one another. If you then also separate those notes in time, its nigh impossible to keep those connections front of mind. I havenāt been using Roam very long yet, but even in a few weeks I stumble back onto notes I wrote that I donāt remember writing.
Information falls out of your head and into your Roam database spontaneously organizing itself, expanding organically. After heavy use for a few weeks, navigating through the database feels like descending into your own Wikipedia rabbit hole ā like swimming through your previous thoughts.
Use Cases
I find myself taking notes on all sorts of things I never used to, or at least rarely did. Here are a few:
Books (I did do this before, but very intermittently and selectively)
Articles
Podcasts
YouTube videos
Meetings, 1:1s, and other work conversations
Useful reference info for around the house (measurements of spaces, home inventory, and more)
CRM-style notes on people (more on this in a second)
Most of that Iāve never kept running notes for, but Roam makes it actually fun to make notes on all of these things. Since I put date tags on a lot of my notes files (if relevant), notching back through the days shows Linked References to things I was working on those days.
For people, any time I have a call or meeting Iāll include a āPeopleā line with links on all their names. Likewise for any mention of them in other pages. Then navigating to a person shows those LRs to all the relevant notes, ideas, conversations, often linked from Daily Notes, so thereās a visible timeline to the references. Itās the closest thing Iāve seen yet to the mythical personalCRM Iāve seen reference to.
Daily Notes
A knowledge graph needs some form of interface to navigate around it. Without the top-down hierarchy of a file tree, the root page of a structureless content database would typically feature search as an entry point for navigation. Roam does have an excellent page search, but it has another anchor that I love: Daily Notes. Each day Roam automatically creates a new date-stamped page for that day, which is the default main page when you open the app. Whatās great about this for such a free form system is that you always have that anchor to link from. If you want a new page for a fleeting idea but are worried a new page will be disjointed from your universe of ideas, and donāt want to search for another page that idea might fit, just spawn it off of Daily Notes. Make a āRandomā or āIdeasā section for the day and add it. Iāve been using this technique for quick stuff and it serves a couple of useful purposes:
Daily Notes functions for me like a productivity journal, a rough record of what I was doing, working on, or thinking about that day.
If a random idea links from a Daily Note and then contains a few bullets of thoughts, navigating back to it weeks later always has a fallback method of tracking back through previous daysā notes to find it.
An added cool thing here, thanks to Linked Reference backlinks, is that any page in which you insert todayās date shows up as a LR under that day.
What I notice in regular usage of Roam, with Daily Notes as the āhome screenā of the tool, is thought taking on an organic structure. The links grow and the dots connect as youāre working. Going and forming connections or describing the organization of your thoughts never need be done with intent ā itās all implied as youāre writing.
In the month that Iāve been actively using it, I have Roam open on my second display all day, with notes continually flowing into the database as they happen. In all the other note-taking tools and systems Iāve used in the past, the friction for tracking ideas was never this low.
TODOs
Any line can be converted into a to-do with a checkbox, which then appears in a special [[TODO]] page that Roam automatically manages. Itās super fast to toss things in there to remember later, regardless of page locations. I pin the TODO page into my sidebar for quick access. Cmd-enter on any line converts it into a to-do.
Since Iām a Todoist user for all of this before, Iām now waffling on which tool I should use for tasks. Iām still in both, but I can see some hope for eventually moving all of that into Roam since itās solving so many other things related to productivity management. The main struggle is that capture into a to-do list inbox (like what I do with Todoist) from mobile isnāt great yet. Browsing to Roam on your phone takes you to a simple āQuick Captureā interface, which inserts blocks into a #Quick Capture section in your daily notes. This is great to have for the random passing thought to go somewhere, but as Iāve used it so far it still requires me to fold those into appropriate places I want them after the fact. Not bad for ideas, but Iād prefer something more devoted to true to-dos for that purpose.
Another random tip: Questions dawn on me all the time I donāt know the answer to, but want to remember to revisit. At the end of the line Iāll just type a #?? tag. Browsing to the [[??]] page then aggregates all the open questions. h/t to Matthieu Bizien who simplified this for me.
The #roamcult
Just search that hashtag and youāll find a community of hundreds of super active, impassioned Roam users all out there evangelizing the product. In some ways, its spartan user interface, semi-opaque shortcuts and tricks about how it works promote cult-like adoption patterns. Its learning curve becomes a badge of honor for a certain type of user. Getting over the hump after a few days of heavy usage delivers a sense of satisfaction if youāre able to tame it to do your bidding.
Some of the product limitations in terms of help and onboarding to expose its power-user features are a function of a small, focused team of a few with a lot to build. Right now itās a power-user tool designed by its intended users. With growth, they plan to expand their product design team which Iām sure will change this rapidly. But it does seem that theyāve embraced the productās opacity to promote the #roamcult. Hopping into the public Slack or looking at videos of how people use it on YouTube will give you an insight into how obsessed the early users are.
More Reading
The Roam white paper is an excellent resource, recommended to anyone curious about the product direction and the core ideas driving its development. Founder Conor White-Sullivan also has a number of video interviews on YouTube that I found super insightful to get a background on why the product works the way it does. Heās also an interesting person in general, and a great Twitter follow.
Roam has clicked for me as the tool for notes I didnāt know I needed. Iām still learning new ways of using it. Itās fun how adaptive Roam is to change; the process of discovery of new ways of Knowledge Management is rewarding. I can just start formatting a new page however I want, and it doesnāt damage the graph of interconnections.
Iām excited to see where the product goes as it continues to take off.
A sign your tool, library, community, or science has made it is when it gets the awesome lists treatment.
Iāve got an upcoming post in the works on my experiences with Roam so far. Lots of the resources listed here are great primers on how others are using it.
Iām liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come in handy, though, if I want to pull all highlights directly from Readwise (which Iām still loving, use it every day).
How the battlecruiser in the early 20th century gave the British a birds-eye view of their fleet before the days of aerial photography, radar, or satellites:
To achieve his vision of a centrally controlled battlecruiser force, Fisher needed a clear picture of the threats. So he set up a top-secret room in the Admiralty building where intelligence reports and shipping news from all over the world were aggregated onto large maps that showed the positions of every friendly and known enemy ship.
This was known as the Admiralty plot. Unlike the displays you might see in a modern military headquarters (which may be updated every few minutes or seconds), these paper maps had a ārefresh rateā of hours or even days. But they were nonetheless revolutionary, because for the first time in history a centralized commander could look at a representation of the world naval situation, with every friendly force and known enemy force tracked all around the world in nearly real time. The British leadership could then issue commands accordingly.
This is one of the best arguments to describe why āproā users on multitouch devices have so much frustration trying to achieve the same levels of productivity they can on a desktop. Even with quality applications, for certain types of work, an iPad can feel like youāre handcuffed.
Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration
Once you have concentration, you realize that thereās another layer: rigor. Itās checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of a litany of potential mistakes you might be about to make, a smorgasbord of straightforward opportunities you might miss. Simple rules are easy to forget when youāre feeling the rush of an advantage. But they never become less important.
Might start giving chess a try just to see how I do. Havenāt played in years, but Iām curious.
The best resource Iāve run across for aggregated data on COVID cases. Pulled from state-level public health authorities; this project just provides a cleaned-up version of the data. Thereās even an API to pull data.
