Notes on a year using Roam Research

My old belief was that storing all these links in a souped-up database would lead me to magically generate new insights about the topics I write about. After several years of banging my head into a wall, I realized that to generate new insights from these links I would need a new approach.

That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs o... See more

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.

A year ago, the idea of networking our notes with bi-directional links became the biggest thing in the tools for thought space since Vannevar Bush described the memex. Top-down hierarchies and tag systems became the pet explanation du jour for everything that was wrong with note-taking. So we all hustled on to the Double-Bracket Express determined ... See more