Roam Research has been around for a while, but that doesn’t mean I’ve heard of it until now. What took me slightly by surprise when I did final arrive at the Roam party was just how good a fit it is for my way of thinking.
I’m not a researcher or academic (I never really was, even as a student), but I am a knowledge worker and spend a lot of time looking through information, understanding new concepts, trying to see connections, and come with strategies. I produce copious amounts of handwritten notes every day, and then struggle to find the information I need. I try to transpose my scrawled notes into something digital – searchable and therefore useful – but invariably I either a) forget that I created the information in the first place, or b) when I do remember that I created the document/note, forget where I put it: Google Keep, Drive, Word, Sticky note, OneNote, and so on.
I don’t have a simple system that works, and as such I have no consistency in how I process this information, and therefore it gets lost and has no value. Roam seems to solve many of these problems by simplifying everything and taking the thinking away.
I’m not going to discuss Roam in any detail here – another time, perhaps – but what I want to share is the concept of Roam, and why it works so well. It goes some way to replicating the neural network, an interconnection of ideas devoid of folder, tags and labels. Your brain finds natural connections between information that may not be immediately obvious – think smells connected to places. In removing the organisational pressure you, the user, are free to commit information to Roam without trying to figure out how to store it.
At this point it’s worth mentioning Zettelkasten. Again, this is not the place to discuss this, but a lot of Roam users are Zettelkasten fans, and Roam certainly allows a fan to replicate the concepts of this approach to information management.
Anyway, Roam uses the idea of a Daily page, automatically created each day with the date as the title. At this point, I let go of the urge to organise (procrastinate) and just commit information to the page. I can then use the awesome search (Lucene?) to find other instances, or use the square bracket notation (type two square brackets around a work or phrase and a new page will be created) to start linking seemingly disparate information together, or just start grouping similar concepts. It’s so easy.
So, if you’re in the mood to try Roam out, go here…I think you’ll like it.