I sometimes wonder how people who are into the "tools for thought space" get anything done other than the meta task of optimising their note taking strategy.
At a certain point I realised I was spending more time figuring out how to tag my mp3 colletion than I was listening to music. I've been observant for similar realisations in other fields ever since.
As someone quite deeply into the "tools for thought" thing... I hardly ever worry about the meta-task. I just make notes tied in to one or other index page, all of which (there are only a few more than a dozen or so) tie into a higher-level index page. Given the search capabilities of a decent personal-wiki-like there's not really much call to arrange, file, tag, classify notes.
I use Zim Desktop for my notes because it's simple and (precisely) because it stays the hell out of my way and lets me focus on my own writing. Over several years of doing this I've tried quite a few other tools, but none manages to hit the sweet-spot of simplicity and affordance I find in Zim. Roam, Notion and other web-based tools are just a fucking annoyance to me, being clunky to use and offering little since I have no need to access my notes across multiple devices, nor any use for publishing/"sharing" my personal notebook or pages with others. If I do want to do that I can (and do) just copy the relevant material over to my (static) blog, `git push` and the job's done.
(Edit to add: the "Backlinks" plugin is vital for using Zim for this purpose.)
Music/video is much more challenging in that regard: our computers' capabilities for searching those is pitiful, but then... keeping bookmarks to such stuff is hardly the use-case for a personal-note tool. It's for keeping your own thoughts and observations, not for bookmarking random blatherings.
Agreed. My “note-taking app” is an ASCII text file with a bunch of URLs and command names in it, each with a description. Totally free-form, even the super simple markdown syntax would be too much to bother with.
I don't know what being in "tools for thought space" means but if it just mean "Roam or similar user", I can give my personal answer: I set up 2 or 3 templates when I started. The most used one I updated once since then. That's it. The time I spent doing this is essentially 0% of my Roam use time.
I can see how someone who checks out blogs/youtube about Roam-like tools might get the wrong impression but those are usually a business so they have to output content.
It also comes down to personality, I suspect some people have a tendency to optimize tooling as a form of procrastination.
> At a certain point I realised I was spending more time figuring out how to tag my mp3 colletion
I then came to conclusion MP3 tags are harmful and removed them altogether. Because you can never tell a song genres reliably and many things can be written many different ways.
true. I don't need better tools for thought, I honestly need better thoughts. I always wonder what kind of Da Vinci levels of output some people have to have to make use of all these tools. The most sophisticated thing I get any use out of is a pile of markdown files
It's the same with hyper-optimized keybinding editor setups. I'd need to be able to think and type about four times faster before some of the things I've seen would make any meaningful difference.
Who tags their mp3 collection without something playing in the background? :)
I've fond memories of hanging out in my friend's room, listening to punk while expanding our extensive Clarion MS DOS database, and then reprinting it to admire it.
I feel the author’s pain of not reviewing back links on Roam. But I think there’s a larger point to be made here: do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem.
During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful. I simply stopped taking them, was happier, and giving my full focus to lectures improved my comprehension. Notes that don’t get read again are a distraction in my opinion.
I think it's actually a big leap from "I never read notes again" to "I shouldn't write notes at all". Writing things down causes you to think more clearly about something, and aids in memory by itself.
We're all different in various ways but I had the same experience as GP. I used to believe in notetaking from lectures and discovered comprehension and memory was much better when I actively listened instead of trying to either copy or process the lecture onto paper.
And, really, there's no substitute for coming to class prepared (by reading ahead or whatever). It makes the lecture process much more useful. In that sense, a list of notes of things you don't think you understand from preparation is probably helpful.
I went with a hybrid approach in university: I didn't take any notes in class so I could actually focus on the lecture and actively think along. Later, in preparation for the exam, I would go through all slides again and turn them into notes, compressing a whole lecture down to 20 pages or so.
I think this is true when clarifying one’s own thoughts. If they’re notes from a book - a big chunk of what I use Roam for - they don’t act as memory aids, not for me at least.
>do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem.
During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes,
Discussing the word "notes" is not easy because it encompasses a bunch of different uses.
- (1) notes as transcription of an external source or memorization aid: e.g. a professor might say something and a student writes that down. Or one comes across a fact and makes a note of it.
- (2) notes to organize internal thought: a canvas for generating/synthesizing/connecting/etc ideas. Things like personal commentary on topics, weighing pros/cons of different future actions, drafts of song lyrics, research ideas, etc.
I think your comment is mostly based on thinking of notes as (1). A lot of people that constantly review notes are talking about category (2).
Sometimes when I spend an hour trying to figure out the right ffmpeg command line options or Linux "find" syntax that works correctly, I'll copy paste those as "notes" in my "tipsandtricks.txt" file. Those feel like a combination of (1) and (2).
Also, if the mental model of "notes" is dominated by (1), it would seem like having a hypothetical universal recording tool combined with a more complete search engine would make note-taking obsolete. I mentioned in a previous comment that such a search engine still wouldn't handle type (2) notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153479
Review as in look at every single one of them from time to time? No.
But I do review them as in it's my first stop in finding something. It's my personal DDG for repetitive queries (vaguely remembering a quote, needing a reminder of some code syntax, or what happened in a book I've read 3 years ago and kinda liked). All my notes are oriented towards what my future self might actually want to find: most important things at the top, going in more details if I scroll down, sometimes adding unnecessary words just because future self might search for them in hopes of reaching that note, etc.
I'm firmly of an opinion that if the search bar in your notes app isn't the most crucial part of your workflow, you're doing something wrong and wasting your time.
I don't take notes, I create documents that I refine over time. A bit of research into a topic gets continually added to as I read related books and articles, with linked pages for the specific sources tied into the core topic with generic content in it. I find taking notes to be pretty pointless, but organising information to be helpful - if that makes sense.
The limit of my notetaking is daily journaling because if I link out to the pages I created or updated with some contextual information (e.g. "read chapter 2 of book X, went off and read a blog post at https://X that was mentioned") then I can retrace the backlinks to find out when/how I learned something. I wish I could do that with things that I haven't put into Roam (or Notion, which to be honest I use more often).
> During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful.
That's interesting, because I almost wanted to make the exact opposite point. I'm actually right now in the process of revisiting my notes, and I think it helps me a lot. Not because they are super useful in and of itself (After 1-3 months have passed now, I understand the stuff deeper now, obviously) but because they help me piece the stuff together.
Anyways, the reason why they then get useful is because I have an extrinsic motivation to read them! (Exams are coming up)
That does in no way make it easier to read them, but it helps in actually reading them.
Then, reading notes and really understanding something will always be hard. I think there is also quite some research ouf there that finds just this: If you really want to understand stuff, you need to put in the effort. It kinda needs to hurt...
This is why I don't think these personal wikis / note -taking tools help too much, especially if one is, like me (and probably most people), more a person who in their downtime maybe likes to read something new and interesting, but better keep that on the light side - it's supposed to be downtime anyways, no?
That leads me then back to the extrinsic motivation: If for example you're a researcher and use Roam (or whatever) exclusively for that (that means restraining also from putting notes in there that have little to do with your actual research), I think the benefits would be much more clear. To be honest, though, that is just a guess. I'm not a researcher myself and I have n't been using note-taking systems for a while now, because of the points explained above.
The fascinating thing about using TiddlyWiki for me has been the way it turns my notes from a bunch of monolithic and siloed documents into something more akin to a personal search engine, letting me see how my past self has explained concepts in my own words. The chunking aspect helps with this. The approach has its own problems, no doubt, but for that alone it was a massive step up.
I also use Tiddly Wiki for my office notes, and I love it. I actually organized it as a proper Wiki, and every note has a home. Tags allows me to find them faster if I need to search (I rarely search because everything has a proper place).
The older way of organization may seem outdated and clunky, but it indeed works.
Yes. I have a bunch of notes which embodies larger subjects or procedures in a more compact and fit-for-purpose format.
These notes are regularly visited, updated and read. Both my personal and professional note troves are actively expanded, reviewed and pruned. However, this is not a deliberate effort, but a part of my normal routine.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience and could use my notes (taken in workflowy while reading papers) towards my thesis rather well. Tried Roam for a while but realized pretty early on it wasn't going to work for me. Main reason being speed! Workflowy works at "speed of thought" for me. For a long while I was lamenting the lack of basics like date stamping and linking, but all that and more is now available and I couldn't be happier. "must be in my workflowy" is a thought that is fairly frequent. WF's tagging with auto completion is better for me than auto linking.
With auto linking, I think the main issue for me is that I want the connection made in my head rather than in a tool. So searching and finding related notes works rather well and the deliberate act helps gradually internalize the links for me.
I've very recently put some research into various tools of that kind. One has to wonder what's going on at Roam. I don't know what the "well-documented community issues" are, you see a lot more posts hinting at some drama than actually telling you what it is. But "slow product velocity" is spot on -- if anything, that's a mild way to put it. Basically every complaint you see veterans make from two years ago is still unaddressed.
I'm now happy with Logseq, which is basically a clone of Roam, with an open-source business model. I really hope the business side works out for them, because for all practical purposes, they've out-engineered Roam to the point of embarrassment. It allows local storage, and will have an iOS app soon (I was able to register for the beta, it's already very solid).
The only way I would use a graph system is if it had named relations. I remember being baffled at systems like Roam and Obsidian because the relations on the graph just conveyed no information... How is a bulldozer related to Wittgenstein...
Now if you can name the relations, that allows you to (1) create shorter notes and push more information into the edges and (2) it makes the graph into a true "mind map".
When you can't name relations, you're forced to make "nodes" for Topics or Tags. And this is where the difficulty comes in with "where do I put this?" Not only that but you're forced to write notes for basic concepts like "programming language" and then you find yourself re-making wikipedia altogether. It becomes absurd.
A friend of Conor White-Sullivan (Roam's creator) propped up his own take on how to do a notetaking system that does support edges, and then he went a step further and opened it for everyone to edit, so it's just a single shared graph:
Mek works at the Internet Archive, and it clearly follows the same spirit of "we'll operate the service, feel free to bring your own frontend if you don't like ours". I wasn't happy with the way that one at graph.global tries to subvert/duplicate native browser features, so I put up a minimal "client" for browsing existing nodes that feels similar to the default one, sans annoyances on those specific axes:
I never got around to allowing editing, unfortunately. You'll have to use the default frontend for that (annoying, since it's buggy) or write a client of your own.
The key issue I see with the graph.global model is that you have to use triples. I've found that this results in big hurdles for throughput—i.e., the opposite of notational velocity. The ideal thing would probably be to allow a Roam-like system where you can start out by simply linking two related nodes, and then fill the edge details after the fact. You could sort of approximate this with w2g as it stands by just using a generic is-related-to connector and then reify the relation. This does mean you would lose the ability to query by relation unless you add further attributes or went back and edited the original connector to replace it with something more appropriate before reification. Stopping in your tracks to find the appropriate connector is something I found to have lots of overhead.
I completely disagree with the author. I have been using Roam for last two years and I could not be happier. Roam deeply changed my life. It became my system for almost everything:
- Personal therapist helping me find patterns in my thought
- A personal journal helping me determine my life value and goals
- A productivity coach through an OKR system with daily, weekly and monthly checkups
- A system for learning and focusing on what to learn
- A system for planning and what to read (a reading list ++)
- Zettlekasten system for developing ideas in my research and startups
- A place for random notes about everything (a short meeting from last year, a startup I stumbled upon two years ago, a recipe someone told me about)
Roam is not the only system I use. I find inadequate for organized thoughts. If you need an engineering wiki for your project, I would not recommend Roam, notion would be the better option. Similarly if you need project planning, go with Clickup. But, if you need a second brain, somewhere chaotic yet very powerful, Roam is your best option.
"There are only two hard problems in CS, cache invalidation and naming." Dan Luu covered cache the other day (https://danluu.com/cache-incidents/) so I guess OP can be said to cover naming: users really hate the constant friction and uncertainty of naming. 'Untitled.doc' is the "blinking twelve" of writing or notetaking systems: just enough effort and trivial inconveniences to stop people from fixing it.
But as always, the solution to every problem in automation is some more automation, and it seems like we could do better than forcing users to aversively write titles. A neural net like GPT-J or T5 is good at abstractive summarization, so there's no reason a note-taking program couldn't make titles strictly optional: use the internal ID as the placeholder, and update the title based on the contents until such time as the user wishes to manually edit or write it themself.
This is the sort of gradual automation which works best in practice: I write my note as I please, the NN does the best it can, and when I read it, I realize it missed the important thing (and I realize the important thing in the first place!) and I edit it. Or I don't because it's fine, and I move on to the next thing.
(And making links/backlinks likewise. We don't need to make the user keep the whole note taking graph in their head and curate it themselves: just use more ML. I do something similar with text embeddings on notes on gwern.net: I write a note, and then it gets embedded and a list of suggested links is inserted for me to edit. I find it relieving to write while knowing that it'll suggest links I've forgotten. A poor man's remembrance agent https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/1996/SS-96-02/SS... Is it perfect? Far from it. But when it's not, I just delete the suggestions and move on.)
An easy low-tech hack for this would be to take the same approach that the Friends showrunners used for naming episodes. Unless otherwise specified, the notesystem operator should be encouraged to use lazy placeholder titles like "my note about using ML to name notes"
I am currently developing exactly this - a notetaking system similar to Roam/Obsidian/etc. which, instead of explicit links automatically searches for related notes. My approach was to utilize some sort of automatic semantic-aware keyword extraction and try to link other notes not only to the current note as a whole, but to its specific terms/sections. For example, if note is containing a recipe, ingredients would have other recepies which use them linked.
I was not aware that such a system already exists. Can you point me to some references? Is it a private system you developed? Are you willing to share more details? Thanks!
Instead of reinventing the wheel, did you consider writing an extension for Obsidian instead? That would allow you to focus on the extraction and aggregation, instead of having to invest a lot of time into also getting an usable text editor (which is a non-trivial task)?
I think I would skip trying to do any entity or term extraction initially. That's going well beyond basic linking. Stick with something like TF-IDF similarity or LDA topic modeling to keep things fast and straightforward until you have the UI/UX worked out, which is always more work than it looks like. (The reason I used neural net embeddings was that the OA API had just added them, and it was a fun excuse to try that out.)
This is not the fall of Roam. It is just the usual cycle of note taking apps. There was Evernote before, and there was probably even others before. And the current trending app is Notion, which will fall at one point too.
The particularity of Roam, is that it was designed for developers, product managers and execs in the tech industry. So its market is pretty small
I've been using Evernote for years and it's great. Everything is in notebooks/subnotebooks AND tags. Their search is great. I mostly store technical how-to's and notes on books I'm reading and subjects I'm learning. Their UI is great and a joy to browse the notes... I did try Roam and I get the promise of bi-directional Nirvana but so far just for productivity and getting stuff done.. Evernote is just fine... shrug
We use notion and when I read this review, the irony is that its weakest point is the search. Just like with most of these tools. In the case of notion, it is not the results, but the fact that search is so slow.
Otherwise, the it is is super powerful. In a few cases, too powerful and having cases when one doesn't use all of its powers.
Notion is still in this space where it does a lot of things decently, and nothing well. It is a decent text editor. It builds decent data tables. It is a decent wiki. If it did at least one of those things we’ll, it would have a lot more long term staying power, and I think the strongest contender is text editing.
Notion will fall as a note taking app, but probably survive as an enteprise wiki. The search which is a big issue for now, will get improved, they just move slowly.
For what it's worth, we've cut p50, p90, p95 search latencies in half compared to December. There are more improvements in reliability and accuracy coming soon too.
I don't use Roam, but a free alternative called Logseq, which works very similarly. I don't share OP's concern of ‘Where should I put this?’ - if I don't know, I put it into today's note, and link it with the rest of the system via [[]]. Anyway, I don't put daily tasks there, nor braindump - for this two things, I prefer Drafts app for Mac. I still believe in bi-direction links, but I put there only something which is at least somehow polished or potentially useful.
I actually grew really frustrated with existing solutions for organising notes:
- Almost all solutions that attempt to take seriously the concept of knowledge graphs are Software-as-a-Service. Ouch. They say you should “build a second brain”. I certainly don’t fancy the fate of my second brain (whatever that may be) to depend on the commercial success of some company.
- All existing editors, even the web-based ones, have some hangover from file-based content management. Even with ability to cross-link to nodes inside a tree structure within files, the rigidity of file boundaries is still over-constraining, especially when one is trying to grapple with unfamiliar concepts during which the structure and links are constantly shifting.
- The maths-authoring abilities (i.e. facilities to edit LaTeX formulae) at best look like an afterthought. Writing anything more complicated than Maxwell’s equations is painful.
Out of desperation I decided to roll my own. I set out the following desiderata:
- It should take the concept of knowledge graph as far as possible. The foremost thing is to do away with files, and promote vertices (nodes) and links (relationships) to first-class status.
- While upholding the previous principle, it should make editing as natural as possible, preferably confirming to existing text-editing habits. The experience should definitely not be like creating nodes and linking them together inside graph databases: slow and confusing.
- It must work without an Internet connection. Or better: it should not make any attempt to connect to the Internet at all.
- It must not be too heavy-weight, and data should be easy to back up. This precludes any JVM-related stuff, docker images, or spinning up Postgres/Neo4j/Datomic/what-have-you just to write some notes on a local machine.
- It should cater for the needs of heavy maths editing.
Now I have been using my own app, powered by sqlite for storage engine and ProseMirror for frontend, for quite some time, and I am really satisfied (hard not to be satisfied by your own work though). It is becoming increasingly polished (full-text search anywhere, very fancy query, loops in the graph, etc.) but I hesitate to open-source it, because as far as I know maintaining open-source projects can be really time-consuming, especially when people actually start using them.
The idea is to center everything around a data-interchange format and then build a ton of tools. I'm sorry the presentation is still very disorderly and that paper is obsolete and so is my website rishi.is and the original declaration of intent at datalisp.is
However! things are moving rather fast lately and I have more or less completely figured out some of the things that have been blocking me so far and I hope to have working prototypes of the most basic tools by the end of the year.
Im thinking about making my own solution too using sqlite!
how do you handle graph queries and looping/traversal?
I am also wondering how i will sync across devices (in my case im thinking of a browser based ui with absurd-sql), probably will just start with the new filesystem api and syncthing or similar alternatives.
> Im thinking about making my own solution too using sqlite!
Me too. I see no problem in querying it and manipulating data. I don't really care about syncing. What I consider the most interesting and problematic are rendering the actual graph and the data, especially an anesthetic and interactive way. Because what I do NOT want to do is another browser/electron-based tool. I am only interested in desktop-native development but I have never seen components relevant to this subject. Apparently they are yet to be developed.
Sqlite supports recursive queries. It is clumsy and not too easy to write, but it works.
For syncing, what I did was to implement a simple automatic backup logic. Then if I want to move to a new device, I just copy the backup I want, which is just a sqlite db file, and restore it. It is not ideal if you are moving from device to device constantly, but it has the benefit that you can compare backups to see what exactly you have changed (I even wrote a tool to build graph visualizations from the output of sqldiff).
> Bi-directional linking, by contrast, creates a link from the first note to the second, and from the second to the first automatically. Roam made this extremely easy to accomplish—just by typing pieces of your notes in [[ brackets ]] you could link between notes, and even create new ones if the note you were linking to didn’t already exist.
I don't think Roam invented this. I remember using Notational Velocity on my mac ~10 years ago which is centred around this concept, also using those double brackets in the exact same way.
If you are curious, Clifford Adams and I originated the double brackets for UseModWiki to support Wikipedia’s initial roll out (on UseModWiki) and their need for “free links” instead of WikiWords. Prior to that I don’t know of any use of that syntax.
Systems following were cloning Wikipedia I assume.
I am glad I am still causing endless chittering about syntax choices twenty years on. I am sure my gravestone will be “[[RIP]]”.
Single brackets were used for numbered or named “footnotes” by the way.
Interesting! I've wondered about that. (Also: hi again! we seem to have so many shared interests over the decades — bbs, usenet, gamedev, c2 wiki, programming languages — that we should meet up someday)
What makes Roam‘s backlinks more useful is what I think of the "write in to pages" pattern. Because on the linked page, the linked items are not actually links but fully transcluded blocks. If there‘s 10 levels below, they are all included in the page. My Roam content is 90% nested daily notes, but a lot of time is spent on pages that have 0 content. The backlinks area is the collaged together page.
All other tools i‘ve seen fall flat on this because they implement backlinks as links, not block transclusion portals.
I wonder if it is, in any way, related to Xerox PARC's NoteCards[1] built in 1984, i.e., "Links are used to represent binary connections between cards."
I find that the note-taking experience is now good enough [0]. You can start a note easily, write and structure your thought with minimal markup, include links and other material without much friction and save the note on your distributed storage/storage. I think we are close to maximal efficiency for this experience, at least in this note=text paradigm.
However, when you want to search or reorganize, most tools only give you minimal support. Searching by keyword ? Only if you tagged it yourself or there's an exact match in the text (forget about synonyms). Notes in domain A but not domain B ? Filter yourself. Split or aggregate notes ? Copy-paste. No housekeeping alerts/tips for reviewing old content. No sharing and user permissions. Taking notes and organizing them on the go is still very second-class citizen.
I'd still use these tools over everything else, the paradigm is too powerful and enabling to leave it aside. I just feel the complete experience is not as smooth as taking a note.
[0] I use Org-roam but the other systems are functionally the same.
> I find that the note-taking experience is now good enough [0]. You can start a note easily, write and structure your thought with minimal markup, include links and other material without much friction and save the note on your distributed storage/storage. I think we are close to maximal efficiency for this experience, at least in this note=text paradigm.
I don't think that is true, because solutions today are not much better than 20 years ago. It's just more flavors and whistles now, but the fundamental flaws are still there.
> However, when you want to search or reorganize, most tools only give you minimal support. Searching by keyword ? Only if you tagged it yourself or there's an exact match in the text (forget about synonyms).
There is fulltext-search. But true, synonyms would improve this. It might even be not that hard to implement. All you need is a list of synonyms for your preferred language, and maybe a spelling check for the input. And it might be better to be just an option, people don't really like oversmart systems which do things they didn't ask for. Google is doing this too, and often enough people are annoyed by it as it leads to wrong solutions.
> Notes in domain A but not domain B ?
Each domain it's own folders/vault. But this is something for a mature search engine on googles level. Not the kind of technology we will see on crappy apps yet. Maybe google could build their own note-app, boundled with their web-search. But I fear it would suck on details and closed after 18 months.
> No sharing and user permissions.
Such systems are called wiki or CMS. Note-Taking is not limited to better text-editors. There are mature enterprise-systems in this space. Though, a simple wiki is already enough for most of this.
> Taking notes and organizing them on the go is still very second-class citizen.
Not really. The Web-Solutions are not worse or better on mobile than they are on desktop. The major problem are small smartphones which are generally bad for working well on the go. Though, you could use a tablet, chromebook or notebook computer. The other problem is, web-service generally suck if you have custom demand or just don't wanna pay for them.
But then again, mobile note-handling is one of the most improved areas in note-taking-space in the last decades. But mostly because mobile is now possible for cheap and on relative high level, not because note-taking itself has improved much.
Personally, I got into Org-roam a couple of years ago, which solved most of my issues with Org-mode. I don't see any reason to change in the future unless there's a fundamental change in my life. Bi-directional links are awesome.
Completely agreed. Plus the fact that all my notes are in plain text, (somewhat) editable on my phone/iPad, and easily searchable, switching to something else doesn't make sense to me yet.
I've been using Roam, more-or-less daily since late 2019. Prior to that I had spent a lot of time with TheBrain as a tool for organising thought, before that there were others. I also spent a couple of years building a tool that Roam supplanted but that may, in due course, supplant Roam.
I would agree with the authors assertion that Roam is well suited to write-once/read-maybe. I certainly spend far less time reviewing notes than I ever imagined I would (that might be related to Roam's poor search/explore experience). Where I diverge from the author is that I find the Daily Notes page answers the question of where do I put this?
I have a daily notes template that includes headings:
TODO
Talking With
Found This
Thinking About
Working On
Completed
Every day a new slate, but ordered around the same core principles. At each heading I use tags, for example under [[Talking With]] might come a heading [[Some one]] & [[Someone else]] from [[Foo Corp]] and then proceed to take notes under that. If I can I will [[topic]] things but if the notes are contemporaneous that can be difficult. Under [[Thinking About]] are any of a set of headings I am current musing on, along with a fragmentary thought I just had. If I ever do review I most likely jump off from the [[Thinking About]] tag.
This allows me not to worry about where to put things but, for example, I can usually find notes of sessions with clients quite easily and branch out from there if I want to follow a train of thought.
As time has gone by I've found the product remains useful although my hope for it and the company is not high.
I'm starting to think notes should be like albums in a screensaver - short, succinct, not linked to another note, and randomly stuffed in your face.
I really enjoy sometime stopping in front of the Chromecast tv and looking at a picture from a family trip. I think a similar experience with notes will make them a lot more useful for the effort you put in to them.
I have a link in my TiddlyWiki to show me a random note. I try to do something in my "Zettelkasten" every day but on some days I just don't know what to write. This is where I review random notes and try to find new connections for them.
I just clicked through a few until I got to "automate testing". Did a fulltext search for "automate" and insert a new link to "only automate deterministic processes" because it should be related for me. One more (bidirectional) link in my notes.
Off topic, but I wish that I had all my time back that was spent on my personal knowledge bases. The worse was spend 3 months of free time writing a little Evernote clone in Clojure, ClojureScrips, and a Firefox plugin. When it was done, I used it for a few months and then shelved it.
For one job, where I managed a few deep learning engineers, I had my work life, including evaluations and promotion materials in EMacs and orgmode. When I left, no one wanted those files because, I think, no one wanted to learn orgmode.
If you like Google, then their Keep notes are pretty good. I am mostly on Apple so I bought an app to export Apple Notes to pdf files automatically for backups, and just use notes. On Linux, I keep a tab open to iCloud.com
I find theres two groups of people within the "PKM space", those who love tinkering with it and therefore do so all the time, and those who absolutely despise it and yet are compelled to try to work it out. It sounds like you fall into that second group, I certainly do.
Strangely, I've never had a problem with it at work. Right now I use boostnote, but I could use pretty much anything else with a search box, however I think the reason there is that I make notes of solutions. If I ever run into the same problem again, I can search that problem and find a solution.
At home meanwhile, I take notes about ideas. Obviously ideas (at least not in my case) aren't triggered by a problem, so theres never a need to search for them unless I force myself to, and yet theres much more of a desire not to forget them.
Add to that the desire to have a "system" thats simple and reliant on no proprietary software features and low maintenance, ect... as well as all the possibilities that present themselves (each with their own flaws) and I end up in this terrible loop of perfecting a system I don't particularly want to perfect.
I'm guilty of the same thing. Especially between jobs I do an incredible amount of tinkering heheh.
My worst such shelved toy turned an org-mode file in your project repo into Kanban board, locally editable in the browser using a websocket to running Emacs server. Spent weeks getting it to sort of work. Never used it once
> My worst such shelved toy turned an org-mode file in your project repo into Kanban board, locally editable in the browser using a websocket to running Emacs server. Spent weeks getting it to sort of work.
This sounds interesting. Have you posted the source/repository for this somewhere?
Am I the only person who uses bookmarks for notes? I will type something like "bizidea - hydroponic urban farming" in the omnibox, save it to bookmarks, and if I want to search bizideas, it's always there. There's also a tumblr I post clips or longer notes to that is also searchable. Any extra step, like opening an app, is a deal-breaker.
I made my own graph-based note-taking tool where you don't write notes, just titles. It's built on Streamlit and really rickety, but (when I have time to tend to it, which I haven't for months with the baby) it's been a very interesting way to compose thought fragments and find ideas for essays for my blog.
[There's lots of fun stuff where nodes have "weight" so we color them by the Gaussian gravity field. But the idea of notes without body is already novelty enough for one sitting, I guess]
The solution is easy though (it was adopted long time ago by Everything2 project): count the actual clicks on backlinks, and sort them by their usage frequency. Maybe even automatically forget the links that were never used for some time, just like human brain does.
I hope AI can create links and backlinks in my notes for me. I guess it will be hard, because the notes are high context that's only in my head.
Most importantly, as far as I know, our brains not only make connections between concepts, but also grade them and mostly work on the strongest edges. It is not clear if we expect the same from the bidirectional note systems, or do we want to expose all the connections to "fabricate serendipity".
I keep meaning to try org-roam, but when I looked into use-cases it didn't really match my flow. I tend to take two kinds of notes: jots and dev notes.
Jots go on paper, and are dealt with quickly.
Dev notes are for my own reference, and I provide them with a certain formality and completeness, as if I were writing documentation.
Years later, when questions inevitably come up about that legacy code, I have a plain text file I can send to whomever, with reference to the Jira ticket. Often I attach these notes to the ticket.
So a whole back-linked network of little informal notes and jots isn't in /my/ flow. It has no useful place. Instead, notes are where I expect: in local files related to the project.
My other major use for notes is the novel I'm working on. There, I can relate to the OP's "where do I put this?" dilemma. I have a scratch section, but it's more like a graveyard of ideas. Otherwise, my notes already have so much structure that I have to make decisions. But, that's the job, isn't it?
This is how human mind functions. If we remembered everything we ever did, we'd have so many thoughts it'd be hard to think more. That's why we have this garbage collection system that helps us forget unimportant rarely thought about information. You'd think a note taking system should be the secondary space for all that discarded information.
This is not a problem specific to bi directional linked note taking systems. Anyone who takes a lot of notes knows that majority of their note database is never touched again. Most notes have a very limited time span after which they are just garbage. Note taking systems are not optimized for this. They try to be a "second brain" excluding the forgetting part. It can't be done no matter how you organize or connect your notes.
After a time you'll realize organization of notes is an unnecessary burden. If you really want to find a note, you'll almost always use search.
> The core idea that caught on with Roam is the concept of a bidirectional link. Previous note-taking systems allowed linking in only one direction: you could link from one note to another, but the note being linked to had no automatic link back to the original note.
That's not really true. Backlinks exist since the first Wiki-Generation and has found their way into other note-apps I've seen over time. The problem is that it's just one feature of many, and rather poorly communicated. Roam had a stronger focus on this, and delivered a modern Wiki-Interface, making it more successful then the old boring wikis which are around for decades and already forgotten by most people.
It seems Roam is now walking the same road? After the initial hype, it must survive the contenst of the daily grind and prove it's worth beyond one dominating feature.
This conversation plays out every time the topic of taking notes comes up, especially if roam research and friends are involved. It's "the Dropbox thing", but instead of being too cool and smart and skeptical to buy into a new storage service, it's the written word, one of the cornerstones of human civilization.
Having things written down is a good idea. The big pile of notes you no longer care about doesn't matter. The value is in the small fraction of things you do end up wanting to come back to. Good luck figuring out which is which ahead-of-time. Writing down things that you think might be useful is so easy, and the cost is negligible.
The notion that writing is mostly useful as a memory aid seems like a totally misguided "both-sides" synthesis. Having things written down is actually just a good idea.
I would like to say two things about writing notes:
1. It is worth writing them even though you never revisit them. You are gaining new information, you are processing them, and then you are passing along your version of the information to something. This process is very helpful in learning.
2. If you are quite sure that you are not going to revisit your written notes, or it is the likely scenario, then, you should write on paper, with pen. This is much better for the brain.
There is a very short book on writing notes which I am currently reading, called How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I am liking what it has to say. This book asks you not to overcomplicate your system of maintaining notes. Then, it becomes a chore in itself.
This is also covered in a book I read recently, written by Andy Hunt called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. I recommend this.
I used Obsidian for a few months and ran into the same issues. One task I set for it was organizing the worldbuilding, plotting and characters for a novel outline. It was excellent for this, and for a Node.js app it's amazingly light and has a great community.
Where it really failed for me was the mobile experience. All I can say is that I kept getting lost in it. This was occasionally a problem on the desktop as well, but on mobile I too often simply could not make my way up to an overview level. This may very well be a problem with me, not the app, but it was enough to kill my interest in it.
I'm back to my ever-growing "brain.md" file at work and (horribly organized) Apple Notes for personal use.
I might be projecting my own problems onto Roam, but as a product developer, the more flexible your product is the harder it becomes to evolve and change. You have a fractal of existing use cases to consider. I wonder if this explains their slow iteration.
I’ve found a nice Roam workflow that makes use of the daily notes, tags for projects, todos and dates. That’s enough to list out tasks each day and add a reminder. I can also set up queries to filter by dates, task status and projects for reporting.
It is very loosely based on GTD which really makes sense to me. But I can't stand tracking tasks in dedicated software like Outlook or Todoist, there's just too much going on and too much to clicking to do. Roam's text interface eliminates all that and is perfect for quickly recording tasks with little ceremony.
I started off having a single page for all my tasks but it soon got very cluttered so I started making use of the daily notes instead. I found that the fresh page in daily notes each morning is much more inviting and it is helped make this process a part of my daily routine.
If a task comes up I'll write it down in the daily notes and put a `/todo` and `#Project-{some-project-i'm-working-on}`. I'll check off the tasks as I work, and if I feel stuck I will add more bullet points to break the task down into smaller chunks to help me get through it.
For any tasks with a due date or that I think I could use a reminder later on I will add a date using the date picker on that todo.
To see all my todos in one place I can go to the TODO page. This is better than scrolling through my daily notes and I can prune my tasks from the TODO page from time to time.
For anything I see that I won't do I can just delete it or I will put a `#someday-maybe` for anything that I can put off or won't get around to soon. I have a filter enabled ignoring anything with `#someday-maybe` to makes the TODO page more focused.
Sometimes I will go to the `#Project-{some-project-i'm-working-on}` page to review what's been done recently, this is good for quarterly reviews and at appraisal time.
That's about it all there is to it. I'm looking into making use of the query syntax to improve reviews but I found ordering by date is not working.
I think that an important thing to point out is that the creation of bi-directional links through [[]] structure should not really be the most important part of the roam activity. The main important point of roam activity is to write notes in blocks, with occasional [[ ]] around the key terms, or something that seems important.
Then, if a user decides that a particular topic of interest looks promising the person can go to the [[]] page, review linked and unlinked references and expand on that topic. Focusing on bidirectional links makes no sense in the long run. The point here is to keep writing notes and use the Roam provided serendipity
I for one will continue to use it… it took me a while to hit the sweet spot of note taking v. note organizing.
For me the right mix was essentially replacing my physical Bullet Journal with Roam. The big value add for me is that I can see my todos in the context of their creation. I often create a task directly within my notes for a meeting. I can tag it inline to link to a specific day/month it, and then later on find the context of the task (the meeting notes). That’s a big help because I’m not always great at writing down details on the “why” of a task - so seeing the back link to the context that created the task is awesome.
At OrgPad (https://orgpad.com), we approached the problem a bit differently. We way more emphasis on the visual connections - the part that our brain has been optimized for about as long as we describe ourselves humans and quite a bit before that.
Also, having the graph really in your sight, you might remember the pattern/ recognize it after a long time too. That might help you when searching for a place to put your notes in.
Already has. Logseq [1] is essentially an open-source Roam that stores its data locally, in markdown files. It's not quite as polished yet, because it's still in beta, but I'm quite happy with it so far.
The idea of bi-directional links sounds promising and exciting in theory, but after trying it out on Obsidian for a couple of weeks I have found following it overly laborious and have now reverted back to the good-old tree structure of Dynalist.
tldr: roam's defining feature, bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes, it quickly breaks down because there's no canonical starting point (by design)
Thought this was a great write-up of the missing link with roam and tools like it. They make it incredibly easy to add notes but after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://dendron.so/, a YC backed PKM tool focused on hierarchies and structured note-taking
> bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes
There's some sleight of hand here, suggesting that bi-directional links were proposed as one's "primary" entry point to notes. Every bi-directional link aware app I've used has a global search feature, and most have a daily journal. Bi-directional links is a strictly additive concept, not mutually exclusive with simple search, daily journals, or even hierarchies.
> after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
This wasn't my experience, though. Maybe because I don't put everything there like braindumps, I can find what I need very quickly, it is enough to remember some tag, or just use Search. (Note: I use Roam free alternative called Logseq, but it works almost identically).
The feedback button at the bottom of this page is a vicious dark pattern. It asks you to rate the post, then asks you to spend time writing more details and explaining your thought, and only then tells you it will throw it away if you don't create an account.
I crossed someone in the street a few months ago who handed me some cute little trinket. If you had the reflex to open your hand in response, you'd be informed you have to pay for it. It's for charity, you see.
This whole category of stringing people along into a bait-and-switch so you can extract something out of them, I wish I had a word to describe the precise kind of way it makes me feel.
I'm also a longtime user of workflowy. It's simple and the search is quick yet it provides more structure than just a text file. I tried an early version of Roam but it was too complicated for my needs and was too expensive. Workflowy could use more integration with other apps, though.
Same. I find the overall UX of WorkFlowy to be so clean & snappy. This, coupled with the recently introduced linking and mirroring features, puts the whole experience on a different level, personally.
I sometimes wonder how people who are into the "tools for thought space" get anything done other than the meta task of optimising their note taking strategy.
At a certain point I realised I was spending more time figuring out how to tag my mp3 colletion than I was listening to music. I've been observant for similar realisations in other fields ever since.
As someone quite deeply into the "tools for thought" thing... I hardly ever worry about the meta-task. I just make notes tied in to one or other index page, all of which (there are only a few more than a dozen or so) tie into a higher-level index page. Given the search capabilities of a decent personal-wiki-like there's not really much call to arrange, file, tag, classify notes.
I use Zim Desktop for my notes because it's simple and (precisely) because it stays the hell out of my way and lets me focus on my own writing. Over several years of doing this I've tried quite a few other tools, but none manages to hit the sweet-spot of simplicity and affordance I find in Zim. Roam, Notion and other web-based tools are just a fucking annoyance to me, being clunky to use and offering little since I have no need to access my notes across multiple devices, nor any use for publishing/"sharing" my personal notebook or pages with others. If I do want to do that I can (and do) just copy the relevant material over to my (static) blog, `git push` and the job's done.
(Edit to add: the "Backlinks" plugin is vital for using Zim for this purpose.)
Music/video is much more challenging in that regard: our computers' capabilities for searching those is pitiful, but then... keeping bookmarks to such stuff is hardly the use-case for a personal-note tool. It's for keeping your own thoughts and observations, not for bookmarking random blatherings.
Agreed. My “note-taking app” is an ASCII text file with a bunch of URLs and command names in it, each with a description. Totally free-form, even the super simple markdown syntax would be too much to bother with.
I don't know what being in "tools for thought space" means but if it just mean "Roam or similar user", I can give my personal answer: I set up 2 or 3 templates when I started. The most used one I updated once since then. That's it. The time I spent doing this is essentially 0% of my Roam use time.
I can see how someone who checks out blogs/youtube about Roam-like tools might get the wrong impression but those are usually a business so they have to output content.
It also comes down to personality, I suspect some people have a tendency to optimize tooling as a form of procrastination.
> At a certain point I realised I was spending more time figuring out how to tag my mp3 colletion
I then came to conclusion MP3 tags are harmful and removed them altogether. Because you can never tell a song genres reliably and many things can be written many different ways.
true. I don't need better tools for thought, I honestly need better thoughts. I always wonder what kind of Da Vinci levels of output some people have to have to make use of all these tools. The most sophisticated thing I get any use out of is a pile of markdown files
It's the same with hyper-optimized keybinding editor setups. I'd need to be able to think and type about four times faster before some of the things I've seen would make any meaningful difference.
They don’t.
Which is why there’s a massive industry catered towards productivity tools.
Who tags their mp3 collection without something playing in the background? :)
I've fond memories of hanging out in my friend's room, listening to punk while expanding our extensive Clarion MS DOS database, and then reprinting it to admire it.
I feel the author’s pain of not reviewing back links on Roam. But I think there’s a larger point to be made here: do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem.
During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful. I simply stopped taking them, was happier, and giving my full focus to lectures improved my comprehension. Notes that don’t get read again are a distraction in my opinion.
I think it's actually a big leap from "I never read notes again" to "I shouldn't write notes at all". Writing things down causes you to think more clearly about something, and aids in memory by itself.
We're all different in various ways but I had the same experience as GP. I used to believe in notetaking from lectures and discovered comprehension and memory was much better when I actively listened instead of trying to either copy or process the lecture onto paper.
And, really, there's no substitute for coming to class prepared (by reading ahead or whatever). It makes the lecture process much more useful. In that sense, a list of notes of things you don't think you understand from preparation is probably helpful.
I went with a hybrid approach in university: I didn't take any notes in class so I could actually focus on the lecture and actively think along. Later, in preparation for the exam, I would go through all slides again and turn them into notes, compressing a whole lecture down to 20 pages or so.
I think this is true when clarifying one’s own thoughts. If they’re notes from a book - a big chunk of what I use Roam for - they don’t act as memory aids, not for me at least.
>do folks review their notes at all? I suspect back links aren’t the actual problem. During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes,
Discussing the word "notes" is not easy because it encompasses a bunch of different uses.
- (1) notes as transcription of an external source or memorization aid: e.g. a professor might say something and a student writes that down. Or one comes across a fact and makes a note of it.
- (2) notes to organize internal thought: a canvas for generating/synthesizing/connecting/etc ideas. Things like personal commentary on topics, weighing pros/cons of different future actions, drafts of song lyrics, research ideas, etc.
I think your comment is mostly based on thinking of notes as (1). A lot of people that constantly review notes are talking about category (2).
Sometimes when I spend an hour trying to figure out the right ffmpeg command line options or Linux "find" syntax that works correctly, I'll copy paste those as "notes" in my "tipsandtricks.txt" file. Those feel like a combination of (1) and (2).
Also, if the mental model of "notes" is dominated by (1), it would seem like having a hypothetical universal recording tool combined with a more complete search engine would make note-taking obsolete. I mentioned in a previous comment that such a search engine still wouldn't handle type (2) notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30153479
> do folks review their notes at all?
Review as in look at every single one of them from time to time? No.
But I do review them as in it's my first stop in finding something. It's my personal DDG for repetitive queries (vaguely remembering a quote, needing a reminder of some code syntax, or what happened in a book I've read 3 years ago and kinda liked). All my notes are oriented towards what my future self might actually want to find: most important things at the top, going in more details if I scroll down, sometimes adding unnecessary words just because future self might search for them in hopes of reaching that note, etc.
I'm firmly of an opinion that if the search bar in your notes app isn't the most crucial part of your workflow, you're doing something wrong and wasting your time.
I don't take notes, I create documents that I refine over time. A bit of research into a topic gets continually added to as I read related books and articles, with linked pages for the specific sources tied into the core topic with generic content in it. I find taking notes to be pretty pointless, but organising information to be helpful - if that makes sense.
The limit of my notetaking is daily journaling because if I link out to the pages I created or updated with some contextual information (e.g. "read chapter 2 of book X, went off and read a blog post at https://X that was mentioned") then I can retrace the backlinks to find out when/how I learned something. I wish I could do that with things that I haven't put into Roam (or Notion, which to be honest I use more often).
> During undergrad, I found I rarely reviewed my class notes, and when I did they weren’t very helpful.
That's interesting, because I almost wanted to make the exact opposite point. I'm actually right now in the process of revisiting my notes, and I think it helps me a lot. Not because they are super useful in and of itself (After 1-3 months have passed now, I understand the stuff deeper now, obviously) but because they help me piece the stuff together.
Anyways, the reason why they then get useful is because I have an extrinsic motivation to read them! (Exams are coming up)
That does in no way make it easier to read them, but it helps in actually reading them.
Then, reading notes and really understanding something will always be hard. I think there is also quite some research ouf there that finds just this: If you really want to understand stuff, you need to put in the effort. It kinda needs to hurt...
This is why I don't think these personal wikis / note -taking tools help too much, especially if one is, like me (and probably most people), more a person who in their downtime maybe likes to read something new and interesting, but better keep that on the light side - it's supposed to be downtime anyways, no?
That leads me then back to the extrinsic motivation: If for example you're a researcher and use Roam (or whatever) exclusively for that (that means restraining also from putting notes in there that have little to do with your actual research), I think the benefits would be much more clear. To be honest, though, that is just a guess. I'm not a researcher myself and I have n't been using note-taking systems for a while now, because of the points explained above.
The fascinating thing about using TiddlyWiki for me has been the way it turns my notes from a bunch of monolithic and siloed documents into something more akin to a personal search engine, letting me see how my past self has explained concepts in my own words. The chunking aspect helps with this. The approach has its own problems, no doubt, but for that alone it was a massive step up.
I also use Tiddly Wiki for my office notes, and I love it. I actually organized it as a proper Wiki, and every note has a home. Tags allows me to find them faster if I need to search (I rarely search because everything has a proper place).
The older way of organization may seem outdated and clunky, but it indeed works.
> do folks review their notes at all?
Yes. I have a bunch of notes which embodies larger subjects or procedures in a more compact and fit-for-purpose format.
These notes are regularly visited, updated and read. Both my personal and professional note troves are actively expanded, reviewed and pruned. However, this is not a deliberate effort, but a part of my normal routine.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience and could use my notes (taken in workflowy while reading papers) towards my thesis rather well. Tried Roam for a while but realized pretty early on it wasn't going to work for me. Main reason being speed! Workflowy works at "speed of thought" for me. For a long while I was lamenting the lack of basics like date stamping and linking, but all that and more is now available and I couldn't be happier. "must be in my workflowy" is a thought that is fairly frequent. WF's tagging with auto completion is better for me than auto linking.
With auto linking, I think the main issue for me is that I want the connection made in my head rather than in a tool. So searching and finding related notes works rather well and the deliberate act helps gradually internalize the links for me.
Spaced repetition is one of the “mind hacks” that has been proven to work:
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
I've very recently put some research into various tools of that kind. One has to wonder what's going on at Roam. I don't know what the "well-documented community issues" are, you see a lot more posts hinting at some drama than actually telling you what it is. But "slow product velocity" is spot on -- if anything, that's a mild way to put it. Basically every complaint you see veterans make from two years ago is still unaddressed.
I'm now happy with Logseq, which is basically a clone of Roam, with an open-source business model. I really hope the business side works out for them, because for all practical purposes, they've out-engineered Roam to the point of embarrassment. It allows local storage, and will have an iOS app soon (I was able to register for the beta, it's already very solid).
The only way I would use a graph system is if it had named relations. I remember being baffled at systems like Roam and Obsidian because the relations on the graph just conveyed no information... How is a bulldozer related to Wittgenstein...
Now if you can name the relations, that allows you to (1) create shorter notes and push more information into the edges and (2) it makes the graph into a true "mind map".
When you can't name relations, you're forced to make "nodes" for Topics or Tags. And this is where the difficulty comes in with "where do I put this?" Not only that but you're forced to write notes for basic concepts like "programming language" and then you find yourself re-making wikipedia altogether. It becomes absurd.
A friend of Conor White-Sullivan (Roam's creator) propped up his own take on how to do a notetaking system that does support edges, and then he went a step further and opened it for everyone to edit, so it's just a single shared graph:
<https://github.com/w2g/w2g>
Mek works at the Internet Archive, and it clearly follows the same spirit of "we'll operate the service, feel free to bring your own frontend if you don't like ours". I wasn't happy with the way that one at graph.global tries to subvert/duplicate native browser features, so I put up a minimal "client" for browsing existing nodes that feels similar to the default one, sans annoyances on those specific axes:
<https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline>
I never got around to allowing editing, unfortunately. You'll have to use the default frontend for that (annoying, since it's buggy) or write a client of your own.
The key issue I see with the graph.global model is that you have to use triples. I've found that this results in big hurdles for throughput—i.e., the opposite of notational velocity. The ideal thing would probably be to allow a Roam-like system where you can start out by simply linking two related nodes, and then fill the edge details after the fact. You could sort of approximate this with w2g as it stands by just using a generic is-related-to connector and then reify the relation. This does mean you would lose the ability to query by relation unless you add further attributes or went back and edited the original connector to replace it with something more appropriate before reification. Stopping in your tracks to find the appropriate connector is something I found to have lots of overhead.
I completely disagree with the author. I have been using Roam for last two years and I could not be happier. Roam deeply changed my life. It became my system for almost everything:
- Personal therapist helping me find patterns in my thought
- A personal journal helping me determine my life value and goals
- A productivity coach through an OKR system with daily, weekly and monthly checkups
- A system for learning and focusing on what to learn
- A system for planning and what to read (a reading list ++)
- Zettlekasten system for developing ideas in my research and startups
- A place for random notes about everything (a short meeting from last year, a startup I stumbled upon two years ago, a recipe someone told me about)
Roam is not the only system I use. I find inadequate for organized thoughts. If you need an engineering wiki for your project, I would not recommend Roam, notion would be the better option. Similarly if you need project planning, go with Clickup. But, if you need a second brain, somewhere chaotic yet very powerful, Roam is your best option.
"There are only two hard problems in CS, cache invalidation and naming." Dan Luu covered cache the other day (https://danluu.com/cache-incidents/) so I guess OP can be said to cover naming: users really hate the constant friction and uncertainty of naming. 'Untitled.doc' is the "blinking twelve" of writing or notetaking systems: just enough effort and trivial inconveniences to stop people from fixing it.
But as always, the solution to every problem in automation is some more automation, and it seems like we could do better than forcing users to aversively write titles. A neural net like GPT-J or T5 is good at abstractive summarization, so there's no reason a note-taking program couldn't make titles strictly optional: use the internal ID as the placeholder, and update the title based on the contents until such time as the user wishes to manually edit or write it themself.
This is the sort of gradual automation which works best in practice: I write my note as I please, the NN does the best it can, and when I read it, I realize it missed the important thing (and I realize the important thing in the first place!) and I edit it. Or I don't because it's fine, and I move on to the next thing.
(And making links/backlinks likewise. We don't need to make the user keep the whole note taking graph in their head and curate it themselves: just use more ML. I do something similar with text embeddings on notes on gwern.net: I write a note, and then it gets embedded and a list of suggested links is inserted for me to edit. I find it relieving to write while knowing that it'll suggest links I've forgotten. A poor man's remembrance agent https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/1996/SS-96-02/SS... Is it perfect? Far from it. But when it's not, I just delete the suggestions and move on.)
An easy low-tech hack for this would be to take the same approach that the Friends showrunners used for naming episodes. Unless otherwise specified, the notesystem operator should be encouraged to use lazy placeholder titles like "my note about using ML to name notes"
I am currently developing exactly this - a notetaking system similar to Roam/Obsidian/etc. which, instead of explicit links automatically searches for related notes. My approach was to utilize some sort of automatic semantic-aware keyword extraction and try to link other notes not only to the current note as a whole, but to its specific terms/sections. For example, if note is containing a recipe, ingredients would have other recepies which use them linked.
I was not aware that such a system already exists. Can you point me to some references? Is it a private system you developed? Are you willing to share more details? Thanks!
Instead of reinventing the wheel, did you consider writing an extension for Obsidian instead? That would allow you to focus on the extraction and aggregation, instead of having to invest a lot of time into also getting an usable text editor (which is a non-trivial task)?
I think I would skip trying to do any entity or term extraction initially. That's going well beyond basic linking. Stick with something like TF-IDF similarity or LDA topic modeling to keep things fast and straightforward until you have the UI/UX worked out, which is always more work than it looks like. (The reason I used neural net embeddings was that the OA API had just added them, and it was a fun excuse to try that out.)
This is not the fall of Roam. It is just the usual cycle of note taking apps. There was Evernote before, and there was probably even others before. And the current trending app is Notion, which will fall at one point too.
The particularity of Roam, is that it was designed for developers, product managers and execs in the tech industry. So its market is pretty small
I've been using Evernote for years and it's great. Everything is in notebooks/subnotebooks AND tags. Their search is great. I mostly store technical how-to's and notes on books I'm reading and subjects I'm learning. Their UI is great and a joy to browse the notes... I did try Roam and I get the promise of bi-directional Nirvana but so far just for productivity and getting stuff done.. Evernote is just fine... shrug
Same here. It is slow though, since v10, but improving.
We use notion and when I read this review, the irony is that its weakest point is the search. Just like with most of these tools. In the case of notion, it is not the results, but the fact that search is so slow.
Otherwise, the it is is super powerful. In a few cases, too powerful and having cases when one doesn't use all of its powers.
Notion is still in this space where it does a lot of things decently, and nothing well. It is a decent text editor. It builds decent data tables. It is a decent wiki. If it did at least one of those things we’ll, it would have a lot more long term staying power, and I think the strongest contender is text editing.
Notion will fall as a note taking app, but probably survive as an enteprise wiki. The search which is a big issue for now, will get improved, they just move slowly.
(I work on Notion, but not on search)
For what it's worth, we've cut p50, p90, p95 search latencies in half compared to December. There are more improvements in reliability and accuracy coming soon too.
I don't use Roam, but a free alternative called Logseq, which works very similarly. I don't share OP's concern of ‘Where should I put this?’ - if I don't know, I put it into today's note, and link it with the rest of the system via [[]]. Anyway, I don't put daily tasks there, nor braindump - for this two things, I prefer Drafts app for Mac. I still believe in bi-direction links, but I put there only something which is at least somehow polished or potentially useful.
I actually grew really frustrated with existing solutions for organising notes:
- Almost all solutions that attempt to take seriously the concept of knowledge graphs are Software-as-a-Service. Ouch. They say you should “build a second brain”. I certainly don’t fancy the fate of my second brain (whatever that may be) to depend on the commercial success of some company.
- All existing editors, even the web-based ones, have some hangover from file-based content management. Even with ability to cross-link to nodes inside a tree structure within files, the rigidity of file boundaries is still over-constraining, especially when one is trying to grapple with unfamiliar concepts during which the structure and links are constantly shifting.
- The maths-authoring abilities (i.e. facilities to edit LaTeX formulae) at best look like an afterthought. Writing anything more complicated than Maxwell’s equations is painful.
Out of desperation I decided to roll my own. I set out the following desiderata:
- It should take the concept of knowledge graph as far as possible. The foremost thing is to do away with files, and promote vertices (nodes) and links (relationships) to first-class status.
- While upholding the previous principle, it should make editing as natural as possible, preferably confirming to existing text-editing habits. The experience should definitely not be like creating nodes and linking them together inside graph databases: slow and confusing.
- It must work without an Internet connection. Or better: it should not make any attempt to connect to the Internet at all.
- It must not be too heavy-weight, and data should be easy to back up. This precludes any JVM-related stuff, docker images, or spinning up Postgres/Neo4j/Datomic/what-have-you just to write some notes on a local machine.
- It should cater for the needs of heavy maths editing.
Now I have been using my own app, powered by sqlite for storage engine and ProseMirror for frontend, for quite some time, and I am really satisfied (hard not to be satisfied by your own work though). It is becoming increasingly polished (full-text search anywhere, very fancy query, loops in the graph, etc.) but I hesitate to open-source it, because as far as I know maintaining open-source projects can be really time-consuming, especially when people actually start using them.
I'm working on a meta-solution: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeVYAP75GAvY8Q8iSfMoWMGgT...
The idea is to center everything around a data-interchange format and then build a ton of tools. I'm sorry the presentation is still very disorderly and that paper is obsolete and so is my website rishi.is and the original declaration of intent at datalisp.is
However! things are moving rather fast lately and I have more or less completely figured out some of the things that have been blocking me so far and I hope to have working prototypes of the most basic tools by the end of the year.
Im thinking about making my own solution too using sqlite!
how do you handle graph queries and looping/traversal?
I am also wondering how i will sync across devices (in my case im thinking of a browser based ui with absurd-sql), probably will just start with the new filesystem api and syncthing or similar alternatives.
> Im thinking about making my own solution too using sqlite!
Me too. I see no problem in querying it and manipulating data. I don't really care about syncing. What I consider the most interesting and problematic are rendering the actual graph and the data, especially an anesthetic and interactive way. Because what I do NOT want to do is another browser/electron-based tool. I am only interested in desktop-native development but I have never seen components relevant to this subject. Apparently they are yet to be developed.
Sqlite supports recursive queries. It is clumsy and not too easy to write, but it works.
For syncing, what I did was to implement a simple automatic backup logic. Then if I want to move to a new device, I just copy the backup I want, which is just a sqlite db file, and restore it. It is not ideal if you are moving from device to device constantly, but it has the benefit that you can compare backups to see what exactly you have changed (I even wrote a tool to build graph visualizations from the output of sqldiff).
> I hesitate to open-source it, because as far as I know maintaining open-source projects can be really time-consuming
Open sourcing something and maintaining an open source project are two things that should not be conflated. You can have one without the other.
Do you have a contact method or a github?
> Bi-directional linking, by contrast, creates a link from the first note to the second, and from the second to the first automatically. Roam made this extremely easy to accomplish—just by typing pieces of your notes in [[ brackets ]] you could link between notes, and even create new ones if the note you were linking to didn’t already exist.
I don't think Roam invented this. I remember using Notational Velocity on my mac ~10 years ago which is centred around this concept, also using those double brackets in the exact same way.
If you are curious, Clifford Adams and I originated the double brackets for UseModWiki to support Wikipedia’s initial roll out (on UseModWiki) and their need for “free links” instead of WikiWords. Prior to that I don’t know of any use of that syntax.
Systems following were cloning Wikipedia I assume.
I am glad I am still causing endless chittering about syntax choices twenty years on. I am sure my gravestone will be “[[RIP]]”.
Single brackets were used for numbered or named “footnotes” by the way.
Here is the design discussion.
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/FreeLink
Interesting! I've wondered about that. (Also: hi again! we seem to have so many shared interests over the decades — bbs, usenet, gamedev, c2 wiki, programming languages — that we should meet up someday)
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What makes Roam‘s backlinks more useful is what I think of the "write in to pages" pattern. Because on the linked page, the linked items are not actually links but fully transcluded blocks. If there‘s 10 levels below, they are all included in the page. My Roam content is 90% nested daily notes, but a lot of time is spent on pages that have 0 content. The backlinks area is the collaged together page.
All other tools i‘ve seen fall flat on this because they implement backlinks as links, not block transclusion portals.
I can say for sure that TiddlyWiki had backlinks many years before Roam existed.
Edit: Okay, I was curious, so I searched the Google Groups page, and found it mentioned as an existing feature in 2006: https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/KQRS-_sKukQ/m/DXZk9...
It is referenced as a feature on WikiMatrix, so it was clearly an established feature for wikis by that point.
I wonder if it is, in any way, related to Xerox PARC's NoteCards[1] built in 1984, i.e., "Links are used to represent binary connections between cards."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoteCards
If you dig deep enough, you always end with Vannevar Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
I find that the note-taking experience is now good enough [0]. You can start a note easily, write and structure your thought with minimal markup, include links and other material without much friction and save the note on your distributed storage/storage. I think we are close to maximal efficiency for this experience, at least in this note=text paradigm.
However, when you want to search or reorganize, most tools only give you minimal support. Searching by keyword ? Only if you tagged it yourself or there's an exact match in the text (forget about synonyms). Notes in domain A but not domain B ? Filter yourself. Split or aggregate notes ? Copy-paste. No housekeeping alerts/tips for reviewing old content. No sharing and user permissions. Taking notes and organizing them on the go is still very second-class citizen.
I'd still use these tools over everything else, the paradigm is too powerful and enabling to leave it aside. I just feel the complete experience is not as smooth as taking a note.
[0] I use Org-roam but the other systems are functionally the same.
> I find that the note-taking experience is now good enough [0]. You can start a note easily, write and structure your thought with minimal markup, include links and other material without much friction and save the note on your distributed storage/storage. I think we are close to maximal efficiency for this experience, at least in this note=text paradigm.
I don't think that is true, because solutions today are not much better than 20 years ago. It's just more flavors and whistles now, but the fundamental flaws are still there.
> However, when you want to search or reorganize, most tools only give you minimal support. Searching by keyword ? Only if you tagged it yourself or there's an exact match in the text (forget about synonyms).
There is fulltext-search. But true, synonyms would improve this. It might even be not that hard to implement. All you need is a list of synonyms for your preferred language, and maybe a spelling check for the input. And it might be better to be just an option, people don't really like oversmart systems which do things they didn't ask for. Google is doing this too, and often enough people are annoyed by it as it leads to wrong solutions.
> Notes in domain A but not domain B ?
Each domain it's own folders/vault. But this is something for a mature search engine on googles level. Not the kind of technology we will see on crappy apps yet. Maybe google could build their own note-app, boundled with their web-search. But I fear it would suck on details and closed after 18 months.
> No sharing and user permissions.
Such systems are called wiki or CMS. Note-Taking is not limited to better text-editors. There are mature enterprise-systems in this space. Though, a simple wiki is already enough for most of this.
> Taking notes and organizing them on the go is still very second-class citizen.
Not really. The Web-Solutions are not worse or better on mobile than they are on desktop. The major problem are small smartphones which are generally bad for working well on the go. Though, you could use a tablet, chromebook or notebook computer. The other problem is, web-service generally suck if you have custom demand or just don't wanna pay for them.
But then again, mobile note-handling is one of the most improved areas in note-taking-space in the last decades. But mostly because mobile is now possible for cheap and on relative high level, not because note-taking itself has improved much.
Personally, I got into Org-roam a couple of years ago, which solved most of my issues with Org-mode. I don't see any reason to change in the future unless there's a fundamental change in my life. Bi-directional links are awesome.
Completely agreed. Plus the fact that all my notes are in plain text, (somewhat) editable on my phone/iPad, and easily searchable, switching to something else doesn't make sense to me yet.
What software are you using to work with org-mode files on your phone/iPad?
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I've been using Roam, more-or-less daily since late 2019. Prior to that I had spent a lot of time with TheBrain as a tool for organising thought, before that there were others. I also spent a couple of years building a tool that Roam supplanted but that may, in due course, supplant Roam.
I would agree with the authors assertion that Roam is well suited to write-once/read-maybe. I certainly spend far less time reviewing notes than I ever imagined I would (that might be related to Roam's poor search/explore experience). Where I diverge from the author is that I find the Daily Notes page answers the question of where do I put this?
I have a daily notes template that includes headings:
TODO
Talking With
Found This
Thinking About
Working On
Completed
Every day a new slate, but ordered around the same core principles. At each heading I use tags, for example under [[Talking With]] might come a heading [[Some one]] & [[Someone else]] from [[Foo Corp]] and then proceed to take notes under that. If I can I will [[topic]] things but if the notes are contemporaneous that can be difficult. Under [[Thinking About]] are any of a set of headings I am current musing on, along with a fragmentary thought I just had. If I ever do review I most likely jump off from the [[Thinking About]] tag.
This allows me not to worry about where to put things but, for example, I can usually find notes of sessions with clients quite easily and branch out from there if I want to follow a train of thought.
As time has gone by I've found the product remains useful although my hope for it and the company is not high.
I'm starting to think notes should be like albums in a screensaver - short, succinct, not linked to another note, and randomly stuffed in your face.
I really enjoy sometime stopping in front of the Chromecast tv and looking at a picture from a family trip. I think a similar experience with notes will make them a lot more useful for the effort you put in to them.
I have a link in my TiddlyWiki to show me a random note. I try to do something in my "Zettelkasten" every day but on some days I just don't know what to write. This is where I review random notes and try to find new connections for them.
I just clicked through a few until I got to "automate testing". Did a fulltext search for "automate" and insert a new link to "only automate deterministic processes" because it should be related for me. One more (bidirectional) link in my notes.
Off topic, but I wish that I had all my time back that was spent on my personal knowledge bases. The worse was spend 3 months of free time writing a little Evernote clone in Clojure, ClojureScrips, and a Firefox plugin. When it was done, I used it for a few months and then shelved it.
For one job, where I managed a few deep learning engineers, I had my work life, including evaluations and promotion materials in EMacs and orgmode. When I left, no one wanted those files because, I think, no one wanted to learn orgmode.
If you like Google, then their Keep notes are pretty good. I am mostly on Apple so I bought an app to export Apple Notes to pdf files automatically for backups, and just use notes. On Linux, I keep a tab open to iCloud.com
I find theres two groups of people within the "PKM space", those who love tinkering with it and therefore do so all the time, and those who absolutely despise it and yet are compelled to try to work it out. It sounds like you fall into that second group, I certainly do.
Strangely, I've never had a problem with it at work. Right now I use boostnote, but I could use pretty much anything else with a search box, however I think the reason there is that I make notes of solutions. If I ever run into the same problem again, I can search that problem and find a solution.
At home meanwhile, I take notes about ideas. Obviously ideas (at least not in my case) aren't triggered by a problem, so theres never a need to search for them unless I force myself to, and yet theres much more of a desire not to forget them.
Add to that the desire to have a "system" thats simple and reliant on no proprietary software features and low maintenance, ect... as well as all the possibilities that present themselves (each with their own flaws) and I end up in this terrible loop of perfecting a system I don't particularly want to perfect.
I'm guilty of the same thing. Especially between jobs I do an incredible amount of tinkering heheh.
My worst such shelved toy turned an org-mode file in your project repo into Kanban board, locally editable in the browser using a websocket to running Emacs server. Spent weeks getting it to sort of work. Never used it once
> My worst such shelved toy turned an org-mode file in your project repo into Kanban board, locally editable in the browser using a websocket to running Emacs server. Spent weeks getting it to sort of work.
This sounds interesting. Have you posted the source/repository for this somewhere?
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What is the name of the app you are using for pdf export?
> When I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time.
I use Roam differently:
- Most of what I write goes into daily notes in a flat structure, using bi-directional links for tagging.
- If a bi-directional link is used often, only then I clean up my linked notes into the page and starring the page if necessary for quick access.
Obsidian has a similar issue, but the open a random note feature does a great job of resurfacing old notes
Am I the only person who uses bookmarks for notes? I will type something like "bizidea - hydroponic urban farming" in the omnibox, save it to bookmarks, and if I want to search bizideas, it's always there. There's also a tumblr I post clips or longer notes to that is also searchable. Any extra step, like opening an app, is a deal-breaker.
I made my own graph-based note-taking tool where you don't write notes, just titles. It's built on Streamlit and really rickety, but (when I have time to tend to it, which I haven't for months with the baby) it's been a very interesting way to compose thought fragments and find ideas for essays for my blog.
Source: https://github.com/asemic-horizon/sursis
Working demo (used by like two close friends besides me; please don't vandalize it):
http://legibet.casino-rhizome.com:8501/
[There's lots of fun stuff where nodes have "weight" so we color them by the Gaussian gravity field. But the idea of notes without body is already novelty enough for one sitting, I guess]
The only thing that has worked for me is strict chronological ordering and search (which doesn’t have to be that smart for one person).
I can manage tags for particular projects.
The solution is easy though (it was adopted long time ago by Everything2 project): count the actual clicks on backlinks, and sort them by their usage frequency. Maybe even automatically forget the links that were never used for some time, just like human brain does.
"Forgetting" feature in notes would be pretty stressful for me.
I hope AI can create links and backlinks in my notes for me. I guess it will be hard, because the notes are high context that's only in my head.
Most importantly, as far as I know, our brains not only make connections between concepts, but also grade them and mostly work on the strongest edges. It is not clear if we expect the same from the bidirectional note systems, or do we want to expose all the connections to "fabricate serendipity".
Was he trying to hit his worcount? All it says is roam needs a search button. How it goes from that to “Fall or Roam” is a little contrived.
I keep meaning to try org-roam, but when I looked into use-cases it didn't really match my flow. I tend to take two kinds of notes: jots and dev notes.
Jots go on paper, and are dealt with quickly.
Dev notes are for my own reference, and I provide them with a certain formality and completeness, as if I were writing documentation.
Years later, when questions inevitably come up about that legacy code, I have a plain text file I can send to whomever, with reference to the Jira ticket. Often I attach these notes to the ticket.
So a whole back-linked network of little informal notes and jots isn't in /my/ flow. It has no useful place. Instead, notes are where I expect: in local files related to the project.
My other major use for notes is the novel I'm working on. There, I can relate to the OP's "where do I put this?" dilemma. I have a scratch section, but it's more like a graveyard of ideas. Otherwise, my notes already have so much structure that I have to make decisions. But, that's the job, isn't it?
This is how human mind functions. If we remembered everything we ever did, we'd have so many thoughts it'd be hard to think more. That's why we have this garbage collection system that helps us forget unimportant rarely thought about information. You'd think a note taking system should be the secondary space for all that discarded information.
This is not a problem specific to bi directional linked note taking systems. Anyone who takes a lot of notes knows that majority of their note database is never touched again. Most notes have a very limited time span after which they are just garbage. Note taking systems are not optimized for this. They try to be a "second brain" excluding the forgetting part. It can't be done no matter how you organize or connect your notes.
After a time you'll realize organization of notes is an unnecessary burden. If you really want to find a note, you'll almost always use search.
> The core idea that caught on with Roam is the concept of a bidirectional link. Previous note-taking systems allowed linking in only one direction: you could link from one note to another, but the note being linked to had no automatic link back to the original note.
That's not really true. Backlinks exist since the first Wiki-Generation and has found their way into other note-apps I've seen over time. The problem is that it's just one feature of many, and rather poorly communicated. Roam had a stronger focus on this, and delivered a modern Wiki-Interface, making it more successful then the old boring wikis which are around for decades and already forgotten by most people.
It seems Roam is now walking the same road? After the initial hype, it must survive the contenst of the daily grind and prove it's worth beyond one dominating feature.
This conversation plays out every time the topic of taking notes comes up, especially if roam research and friends are involved. It's "the Dropbox thing", but instead of being too cool and smart and skeptical to buy into a new storage service, it's the written word, one of the cornerstones of human civilization.
Having things written down is a good idea. The big pile of notes you no longer care about doesn't matter. The value is in the small fraction of things you do end up wanting to come back to. Good luck figuring out which is which ahead-of-time. Writing down things that you think might be useful is so easy, and the cost is negligible.
The notion that writing is mostly useful as a memory aid seems like a totally misguided "both-sides" synthesis. Having things written down is actually just a good idea.
I would like to say two things about writing notes:
1. It is worth writing them even though you never revisit them. You are gaining new information, you are processing them, and then you are passing along your version of the information to something. This process is very helpful in learning.
2. If you are quite sure that you are not going to revisit your written notes, or it is the likely scenario, then, you should write on paper, with pen. This is much better for the brain.
There is a very short book on writing notes which I am currently reading, called How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I am liking what it has to say. This book asks you not to overcomplicate your system of maintaining notes. Then, it becomes a chore in itself.
This is also covered in a book I read recently, written by Andy Hunt called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. I recommend this.
I used Obsidian for a few months and ran into the same issues. One task I set for it was organizing the worldbuilding, plotting and characters for a novel outline. It was excellent for this, and for a Node.js app it's amazingly light and has a great community.
Where it really failed for me was the mobile experience. All I can say is that I kept getting lost in it. This was occasionally a problem on the desktop as well, but on mobile I too often simply could not make my way up to an overview level. This may very well be a problem with me, not the app, but it was enough to kill my interest in it.
I'm back to my ever-growing "brain.md" file at work and (horribly organized) Apple Notes for personal use.
I might be projecting my own problems onto Roam, but as a product developer, the more flexible your product is the harder it becomes to evolve and change. You have a fractal of existing use cases to consider. I wonder if this explains their slow iteration.
I’ve found a nice Roam workflow that makes use of the daily notes, tags for projects, todos and dates. That’s enough to list out tasks each day and add a reminder. I can also set up queries to filter by dates, task status and projects for reporting.
Would you care to share that? Combining notes and to-dos is something I've been trying to achieve for a while now, without much success.
It is very loosely based on GTD which really makes sense to me. But I can't stand tracking tasks in dedicated software like Outlook or Todoist, there's just too much going on and too much to clicking to do. Roam's text interface eliminates all that and is perfect for quickly recording tasks with little ceremony.
I started off having a single page for all my tasks but it soon got very cluttered so I started making use of the daily notes instead. I found that the fresh page in daily notes each morning is much more inviting and it is helped make this process a part of my daily routine.
If a task comes up I'll write it down in the daily notes and put a `/todo` and `#Project-{some-project-i'm-working-on}`. I'll check off the tasks as I work, and if I feel stuck I will add more bullet points to break the task down into smaller chunks to help me get through it.
For any tasks with a due date or that I think I could use a reminder later on I will add a date using the date picker on that todo.
To see all my todos in one place I can go to the TODO page. This is better than scrolling through my daily notes and I can prune my tasks from the TODO page from time to time.
For anything I see that I won't do I can just delete it or I will put a `#someday-maybe` for anything that I can put off or won't get around to soon. I have a filter enabled ignoring anything with `#someday-maybe` to makes the TODO page more focused.
Sometimes I will go to the `#Project-{some-project-i'm-working-on}` page to review what's been done recently, this is good for quarterly reviews and at appraisal time.
That's about it all there is to it. I'm looking into making use of the query syntax to improve reviews but I found ordering by date is not working.
I think that an important thing to point out is that the creation of bi-directional links through [[]] structure should not really be the most important part of the roam activity. The main important point of roam activity is to write notes in blocks, with occasional [[ ]] around the key terms, or something that seems important.
Then, if a user decides that a particular topic of interest looks promising the person can go to the [[]] page, review linked and unlinked references and expand on that topic. Focusing on bidirectional links makes no sense in the long run. The point here is to keep writing notes and use the Roam provided serendipity
I for one will continue to use it… it took me a while to hit the sweet spot of note taking v. note organizing.
For me the right mix was essentially replacing my physical Bullet Journal with Roam. The big value add for me is that I can see my todos in the context of their creation. I often create a task directly within my notes for a meeting. I can tag it inline to link to a specific day/month it, and then later on find the context of the task (the meeting notes). That’s a big help because I’m not always great at writing down details on the “why” of a task - so seeing the back link to the context that created the task is awesome.
At OrgPad (https://orgpad.com), we approached the problem a bit differently. We way more emphasis on the visual connections - the part that our brain has been optimized for about as long as we describe ourselves humans and quite a bit before that. Also, having the graph really in your sight, you might remember the pattern/ recognize it after a long time too. That might help you when searching for a place to put your notes in.
Happy to answer questions.
Org Mode -> workflowy -> roam
That has been my journey. Each one improves on the other.
The big downfall of roam, I suspect, will be that the thing they've created is reproducible by others.
It's a great tool though. I just don't think there is mote around it. The next thing will incorporate its advances.
> The next thing will incorporate its advances.
Already has. Logseq [1] is essentially an open-source Roam that stores its data locally, in markdown files. It's not quite as polished yet, because it's still in beta, but I'm quite happy with it so far.
[1]: https://logseq.com/
The idea of bi-directional links sounds promising and exciting in theory, but after trying it out on Obsidian for a couple of weeks I have found following it overly laborious and have now reverted back to the good-old tree structure of Dynalist.
yeah same here tried obsidian and dendron moved to checkvist - because it is keyboard driven
tldr: roam's defining feature, bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes, it quickly breaks down because there's no canonical starting point (by design)
Thought this was a great write-up of the missing link with roam and tools like it. They make it incredibly easy to add notes but after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://dendron.so/, a YC backed PKM tool focused on hierarchies and structured note-taking
Wrote a tweet thread about my takeaways from the article here: https://twitter.com/kevins8/status/1493020520815546368?s=20&...
> bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes
There's some sleight of hand here, suggesting that bi-directional links were proposed as one's "primary" entry point to notes. Every bi-directional link aware app I've used has a global search feature, and most have a daily journal. Bi-directional links is a strictly additive concept, not mutually exclusive with simple search, daily journals, or even hierarchies.
> after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
This wasn't my experience, though. Maybe because I don't put everything there like braindumps, I can find what I need very quickly, it is enough to remember some tag, or just use Search. (Note: I use Roam free alternative called Logseq, but it works almost identically).
The feedback button at the bottom of this page is a vicious dark pattern. It asks you to rate the post, then asks you to spend time writing more details and explaining your thought, and only then tells you it will throw it away if you don't create an account.
I crossed someone in the street a few months ago who handed me some cute little trinket. If you had the reflex to open your hand in response, you'd be informed you have to pay for it. It's for charity, you see.
This whole category of stringing people along into a bait-and-switch so you can extract something out of them, I wish I had a word to describe the precise kind of way it makes me feel.
We have a word: cheated.
for me search is the most powerful feature of workflowy keeping me for years hooked
I'm also a longtime user of workflowy. It's simple and the search is quick yet it provides more structure than just a text file. I tried an early version of Roam but it was too complicated for my needs and was too expensive. Workflowy could use more integration with other apps, though.
Same. I find the overall UX of WorkFlowy to be so clean & snappy. This, coupled with the recently introduced linking and mirroring features, puts the whole experience on a different level, personally.