(2020-09-30) Roam Is A Notetaking Tool And A Dream Of A Better Self

Roam Is a Note-Taking Tool, and a Dream of a Better Self. Kyle Stratis loves to learn, but like most people, he doesn’t remember everything he reads. So he has to take lots of notes... he became a software engineer, he’d jot things down in a text editor — handy for a quick brain dump, but lousy for seeing connections.. He fell into a creative rut for about a year. And he started looking for something that would help him dig his way out.

Then, this past spring, Stratis stumbled upon something on Twitter. He found #RoamCult.

Stratis, an active participant on the Roam Slack, said that, while Roam is probably most useful for people doing “knowledge work” — he’s crossed paths with plenty of scholars, project managers and marketers in the community — the app’s usefulness isn’t confined to a certain job function, per se. Rather, Roam is right-sized for people with a certain outlook — people who, in Stratis’ words, “want to learn more effectively, to understand and synthesize new ideas.”

People who are not just angling for productivity, but who are in a sense hoping to optimize themselves. People who, in essence, want a second brain.

Roam is the newest shining star in an increasingly crowded galaxy of apps designed for organizing your life.

Notion... Evernote... Apple’s Notes, Bear, Todoist, OneNote, Obsidian, Ulysses, TiddlyWiki, Workflowy and many others

the concept behind them dates back much further

You can trace bi-directional linking in note-taking back to 1945, when The Atlantic published renowned engineer Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think.”

The dream was partially kept alive by Ted Nelson.

Alas, the web as we know it still doesn’t work that way, and Wikipedia is probably the closest mainstream approximation to Bush’s dream that we have.

Another touchstone is Zettelkasten.

Now, Zettelkasten and other knowledge-management techniques are remixed into courses and seminars and marketed to digital-native knowledge workers hoping to unlock their full productivity potentials. One of the more popular ones is literally called Building a Second Brain.

How people use these tools varies. But a common approach, I’ve learned, is to use them “for everything.”

What makes Roam so valuable, he said, is how the act of using it spurs new ideas.

The idea is that the ability to see links between seemingly unrelated ideas helps spark new ones. So, the “Midwest” tag from the previous urban planning book example could, let’s say, be viewed in relation to a New York Times article you read about the decline of industrial manufacturing in the Midwest. Maybe seeing a literal connection between those two notes prompts an idea for a blog post.

But why now? The rise of Roam and other personal knowledge management tools can be partly attributed to the rising sophistication and ease of use of the programs, as well as that of the users themselves.

Nathan Baschez... said there may also be some correlation between the rise of bootstrapped newsletters and podcasts and the popularity of tools like Roam. “These are tools that are really helpful when you’re researching for content you’re creating

“I think a lot of people are shifting toward working toward their passions. A lot of that is some form of knowledge work. And if you want to excel in that, you have to find the tools that work for that,” he said. “Any sort of craftsperson needs their tool.”

Is the rise of Roam just the culmination of a decades-long search for a better way to take notes and remember research? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s something deeper than that, something more existential. Maybe it’s about transcending natural human limitations

“A lot of people find it fun and satisfying to take ideas seriously and study them and take notes on them,” he said. “There’s definitely some ambition in there, but there’s also a playfulness that’s kind of disconnected from a means to an end.”