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He's going to roam from Roam
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 17, 2022 at 07:59 PM
Interesting back and forth on Roam.
I could never warm up to Roam myself, but I saw that as just that it didn’t fit my style of note-taking (or lack thereof). Roam does have room for improvement, as Bill points out. But if it works for you, those deficiencies are probably not a problem.
To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the idea of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn’t invent that feature, but it seems to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.
Steve
Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 18, 2022 at 12:24 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the idea
>of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn’t invent that feature, but it seems
>to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.
Yes, it’s a very simple idea, and in a way not that much different from Google Calendar automatically advancing through time and always showing you today’s date.
One could manually re-create it every day in WorkFlowy, which I did try in the past, but I just couldn’t keep up with it. You forget to do it one day, and inertia sets in, and the whole routine falls apart.
Also, psychologically it’s helpful that Roam starts with a blank new date every day. Because starting with reviewing yesterday’s incomplete todos may lead you down the wrong path. Having a blank slate allows you to focus on today’s priorities and reassess your previous priorities later. You can still return to yesterday’s incomplete todos and decide whether they are worth revisiting or need to be moved further into the future.
But another important feature is the date links themselves, given that each date such as [[February 18th, 2022]] is a page and a link, and therefore backlinks are also automatically produced wherever you insert a date link, making it easy to connect related events and plan things.
This was the feature that allowed me to construct my own todo + calendar system where I can send tasks into the future to remind me when the day arrives or go back easily into the past to see how certain things unfolded.
ConnectedText date topics could do much of this, but the problem is they are not online, and so they harder to access when you need to work across multiple machines on different platforms in different locations. This is also why I can’t switch to Logseq.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 18, 2022 at 09:38 AM
NotePlan does this very well, of course. But personally, I’ve found my preferred way of making rapid notes to myself is using an Inbox (in my case, in both Notebooks – for general info and stuff – and TickTick – for more task-related stuff), so I can then rapidly distribute the jottings in my Inbox to whichever day is most appropriate. The daily note thing I find particularly useful for journaling (Craft does this rather well, too).
Getting back to @Alan’s original point about backlinks – this is an interesting issue, I must say. Are they really as useful as people have been led to believe? And I’d have to say, as others in various forums have already said, that this depends on how you prefer to work. Clearly the original inventor of Zettelkasten, Luhmann, found them useful. But they aren’t some kind of ultimate cure-all – you have to read through backlinks just as you have to read through the citations or footnotes in an academic article.
Which is why I think the positioning of backlinks is so important – for my money, all apps that put them in a right-hand navigation bar (e.g. Obsidian, UpNote) have got the right idea (UpNote has one of the best, most useful right-hand navigation bars of any note-taking app – they make **full use** of it, rather than just using the top of it as a kind of fragment collection zone; actually, Curio does a good right-hand navigation bar, too). Putting backlinks right at the bottom of a note/article/document isn’t very helpful – you can only visualise relationships if you scroll right down to the bottom, which is tedious if, like me, you rely on very fast scan-reading to collect information on a subject at high speed (typical of a translation workflow). Something to think about/discuss, anyway!
Cheers!
Bill
Dr Andus wrote:
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>>To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the
>idea
>>of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn’t invent that feature, but it seems
>>to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.
>
>Yes, it’s a very simple idea, and in a way not that much different from
>Google Calendar automatically advancing through time and always showing
>you today’s date.
>
>One could manually re-create it every day in WorkFlowy, which I did try
>in the past, but I just couldn’t keep up with it. You forget to do it
>one day, and inertia sets in, and the whole routine falls apart.
>
>Also, psychologically it’s helpful that Roam starts with a blank new
>date every day. Because starting with reviewing yesterday’s incomplete
>todos may lead you down the wrong path. Having a blank slate allows you
>to focus on today’s priorities and reassess your previous priorities
>later. You can still return to yesterday’s incomplete todos and decide
>whether they are worth revisiting or need to be moved further into the
>future.
>
>But another important feature is the date links themselves, given that
>each date such as [[February 18th, 2022]] is a page and a link, and
>therefore backlinks are also automatically produced wherever you insert
>a date link, making it easy to connect related events and plan things.
>
>This was the feature that allowed me to construct my own todo + calendar
>system where I can send tasks into the future to remind me when the day
>arrives or go back easily into the past to see how certain things
>unfolded.
>
>ConnectedText date topics could do much of this, but the problem is they
>are not online, and so they harder to access when you need to work
>across multiple machines on different platforms in different locations.
>This is also why I can’t switch to Logseq.
>
>
Posted by satis
Feb 18, 2022 at 04:51 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
> for my money, all apps that put them in a right-hand navigation bar
> (e.g. Obsidian, UpNote) have got the right idea (UpNote has one
> of the best, most useful right-hand navigation bars of any
> note-taking app – they make **full use** of it, rather than just
> using the top of it as a kind of fragment collection zone; actually,
> Curio does a good right-hand navigation bar, too). Putting backlinks
> right at the bottom of a note/article/document isn’t very helpful
I think that’s a great point; it puts into words something I liked about some apps without quite realizing why.
Posted by nathanb
Apr 1, 2022 at 05:30 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>Getting back to @Alan’s original point about backlinks
>– this is an interesting issue, I must say. Are they really
>as useful as people have been led to believe? And I’d have to say,
>as others in various forums have already said, that this depends on how
>you prefer to work. Clearly the original inventor of Zettelkasten,
>Luhmann, found them useful. But they aren’t some kind of ultimate
>cure-all – you have to read through backlinks just as you have to
>read through the citations or footnotes in an academic article.
>
>
I have a hard time going back to anything without backlinks after using roam. The other core organizing feature is the block references though and these two things are amazing together.
Or for use old school note software nerds, Block References are transclusion at the paragraph level. Previous attempts at transclusion that have been at the page level (ultra recall etc).
This is the first app I’ve used where it is fun to have conversations with myself throughout my stuff.