Roam Why I Love It and How I Use It
Big Reasons for using Roam
- Classic notes live in hierarchical structure i.e. Notion, Evernote, etc. Notion in particular allows for infinite nesting.
- In Roam they live “everywhere and nowhere”. It’s more a flat listing and dependent on rich references. Every page lives on its own, not inside of another page. This helps keep ideas fluid.
- The focus on connectedness across the entirety of your note space appears to be the big feature. It “changes your interaction with information” by removing the barrier to create new relationships between concepts or things. For example, the article shows this
, which, in other systems, would be a pretty simple paragraph rundown of how the day went. But because of Roams focus on references, it lends itself to constantly referencing relevant ideas that could easily come up in other notes like “running shoes”.
- Personally it sounds to me like giving up some of the traditional structure would be freeing. In my current Notion systems, I’m constantly questioning the optimality of structure, whether it fits well with the way I’m “supposed” to be thinking about it, etc. Having a flat note structure where everything (tags, topics, sources, whatever) is a page without nesting, and all the structure lies in how those pages are connected, is a pretty nice idea.
- An additional thought here is that perhaps an approach like this could help me reduce what I call “note scatter”. That is, if all notes are on the same level, and referencing previous thoughts/writing is as easy it is, maybe it will make it easier to “absorb” the informalities of the system and make it more clear how canonical locations for certain content can appear. For example, having content about a technology related to a particular objective (let’s say Pelican under the samgriesemer.com objective), I find myself unsure of the breakdown between Pelican related material specific to the site vs putting it in a global resource inside the Knowledge Base. If I were to do this in Roam, whatever I say about Pelican within the samgriesemer.com objective is just a click away as a reference point at the bottom of the page. Pretty powerful.
Easy Links and Page Creation
In Roam you don’t need a reason to create a page. Everything is ultimately a page, including tags, empty wiki links, etc stored in a flat hierarchy.
Bidirectional Linking
Each time a particular page is referenced somewhere, that referencing block gets added to the referenced page’s “references” section. That is, when visiting a page, you can see all the locations across the system that have referenced the page you are on, as well as a snapshot of that content to give you context. This builds on the idea of wiki which already encourages “forward links” to other pages by making it easy to find your way back to pages that the current page as a reference. Roam also aggregates all “unlinked” locations where the page title (could be single word or phrase) has been used, but not explicitly linked as a wiki page. You can then link them, changing their original text to be actual wiki links. The author notes how this particular feature is one of the best they’ve seen for creating novel connections across a note system, and I’d have to agree; while it’s quite simple, it does the hard work of tracking down likely instances of connection(i.e. you literally used the word or phrase) and actually draws that connection so can follow the link in the future. These two features are part of Roam’s “novel contribution,” and something they do very well. This really allows one to “let go” of some of the deeply structured approaches and allow the system links to take over and handle connecitons between relevant notes for you.
Little Things
Automatically Fixing Duplicates
In the case two page were created with the same name except case, renamed the lower case page to the properly titled page will merge the two pages content together automatically.
Dates are Pages
Anytime dates are referenced, they are referenced as pages. So if you link a date in the future, that block will become available under that date’s “references” section, just like any other page. Casually linked to dates can get messy in other systems because those links just get lost, but in Roam these get tied back to the canonical day page and are easily viewable.