I Wrote 5k Words in Roam Research One Evening
It wasn’t that I couldn’t stop… it was that I didn’t want to.
One of my favorite things about university was the feeling after leaving a mind-blowing class and having my brain swimming with new thoughts, having huge ideas ideas reshape my thinking and how those concepts can affect the world.
Each term I’d buy a multipack of the thin moleskine soft cover journals, with each mini journal covering a class. There was something purely joyful about filling up a notebook throughout a semester, seeing your journey of understanding through articles & projects, watching your knowledge seem to grow by the page. And of course, returning to those pages in your next semester, or after finishing school to refresh your memory of the systems of thought and experts you were exposed to. I wrote these notebooks with the intent to keep them, tools to guide my thought in the future and reference back to.
Over my undergraduate years I amassed a sizable collection of notes, and have happily held on to them, but it’s always been hard to know just what to do with them. Mostly, I’ve been looking for a solution to not only always have access to them, but to be able to link them together in the same way I experienced gaining the knowledge in the first place.
See, I can read through my notebook from a class on the history of modern drugs and medicine and experience that particular flow of ideas again, but what this re-reading doesn’t capture is that back then I immediately went to my next class on the history of public health in America (with it’s own notebook) and I experienced them simultaneously, along with other equally impactful classes. Naturally there were so many interconnections between the topics as I learned them live that having two separate notebooks, while helpful for class purposes, didn’t allow me to easily and fully depict how intertwined the themes and concepts were, and reflect how the knowledge I built was inseparable.
This is why when I recently signed up for a free trial of Roam Research, a powerful knowledge management tool masquerading as a deceptively simple note-taking app, the first thing I did was put it to the test with mapping out terrain from some my college notebooks, seeing how well I could weave concepts, research summaries, and written projects into Roam’s reconfigurable universe of notes. Six hours later, I knew I’d found something special.
The power of Roam Research lies in the seemless linking of concepts and ideas into a network. As a highly lateral thinker, this was truly a game changer. No longer did I have to cobble together strange tagging systems, or settle with inaqeduate journal arrangements in Evernote or OneNote.
When it comes to emerging products and apps, while I usually like to take a reserved stance, every once in a while somethings comes along that that deserves the hype. In my mind, if something can channel your passion for writing, inspire you to re-conceptualize the knowledge and learning that you’ve gained over the years, and perhaps most importantly, provide impetus to organize and tackle your goals and aspirations in life, it’s worth considering. I’ve certainly already gotten a lot out of it just from what I’ve written so far.
So, will Roam Research become my one and only? Not quite. Right now we’re at a turning point for knowledge management tools, with more and more teams focusing on novel attempts across the space. I’ve written before about Notion, and how it can bring excellent project management tools for creatives. There are also many, many others that deserve mention, including Obsidian, Remnote, ClickUp, each with their own killer features and trade-offs. For me, I’ll focus on a hybrid system incorporating the best from different apps to suit my needs, with Roam playing a key part. Have you had experiences with Roam Research or any others? Let me know how you’ve put them to use in the comments.
So is Roam Research right for you? Perhaps. Give yourself some time with it and a few other tools and see whether it suits your needs. The good thing is that there are options and plenty of opportunities to learn tips and tricks for each platform that may shed light on which one is for you. If you want to learn more here is some recommended content to check out:
[1] Ali Abdal, “My Favourite Productivity App for Students — Notion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODl5FOMu8kI
[2] Francesco D’Alessio, “Is Roam Research the Next Big Tool!?https://medium.com/@francescod_ales/is-roam-research-the-next-big-tool-2e969a5245c2
[3] NotesWithRen “Notion vs Roam vs Obsidian | ULTIMATE Note-taking App? For Students”
Disclaimer: I am not, nor have been affiliated with Roam Research, Notion or any other tool. I simply see value in recommending them to others because I believe they can be immensely useful in people’s lives like they have been in mine.
