Notes on a year using Roam Research

Ultimately, I suspect I will always want more from note-taking software than it gives me — because what I truly want is for the software to read my mind. I want it to extract my thoughts automatically (and securely!) and polish them until they resemble wisdom. And I want it to resurface my ideas at calculated intervals, helping me make new connecti... See more

In Matuschak’s view, a finely distilled note is the fundamental unit of knowledge work. But we are generally lousy at taking notes, both because the notes we take give us weak feedback (we may go weeks without returning to a note we have taken, and may not return to it at all) and because we have no role models (do you know anything about anyone el... See more

On the surface, I realize, that looks a lot like adding a hashtag to a document. In practice, though, I found myself using bidirectional links much differently than tags. In Roam, I created bidirectional links to concepts that I wanted to explore, like “the internet is too fast” or “social networks have been a boon to the conservative movement.” Wh... See more

Some note-taking software will now show you a subset of your notes at regular intervals to help you jog your memory; a third-party plug-in for this is now available for Roam. To my mind, though, this needs a first-party solution: Roam should show me old concepts, ideas, and even people and places when I open it each day, and encourage me to do more... See more

The bigger issue, though, is what I have come to think of as note-taking’s camera roll problem: no matter how well they organize themselves, most notes are still doomed to be forgotten. When it came to pictures, Timehop and later Google Photos addressed this problem by making an effort to resurface old photos in a variety of ways: on the anniversar... See more

Of course, software can only take you so far. I still don’t write down most of the thoughts that I have, even on subjects I have written multiple columns about. Nor do I try to disstill these thoughts into sharp-edged little maxims the way Matuschak does in his own note-taking practice. He says he spends two hours a day refining notes he has previo... See more

And despite the breakthroughs Roam has made in rethinking note-taking, the software itself leaves a lot to be desired. Its bare-bones, brutalist design has all the charm of a command line. Enhancing its functionality often involves searching for some arcane bit of CSS written by a fellow Roam obsessive and inserting it as a code block in your daily... See more