Abe

I continue to journal most days, and occasionally find myself working to refine one concept or another among those notes.

But the original promise of Roam — that it would improve my thinking by helping me to build a knowledge base and discover new ideas — fizzled completely.

The most natural implementation of any feature request is additive, attempting to leave all other elements of the design in place and simply inserting one new component: a new button in a UI or a new parameter to a function. As this process is repeated, the simplicity of a system is lost and complexity takes its place. This pattern is often... See more

Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.

All information tools have to give users some... See more

Traditionally, modern software is designed in a linear structure. Notably known as the “workspace”— a popular file cabinet structure, that reminds the parent-child relationship. Working in this structure conveys a feeling of playing a “pass the parcel” game. Every time you open a folder, the next one is revealed.

All this makes sense, as linearity... See more

Note-taking apps, simply put, are our best option for “bending” productivity to the ebb and flow of our days, and for managing the work-in-process inventory of ideas that represents our main asset as knowledge workers.