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A Beginner’s Guide to Roam Research

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Personal Knowledge Management Is Heating Up

What is roam research, roam research main concepts, getting started, developing a network of knowledge, extending and customizing roam, final thoughts, frequently asked questions (faqs) about roam research.

Roam Research is a friction-free note-taking and knowledge management application . It’s getting a lot of attention, and the label “game changer” has been used. You’re likely reading this article because you’ve heard the hype and are wondering if it’s true, and whether its features are a good fit for your needs.

At first glance, it appears to be a Workflowy-type online outliner, but first impressions can be deceptive. There’s a lot more power under the hood, such as the capability to create a network of knowledge that connects your thoughts using links and backlinks.

It’s a flexible tool that can be used for many tasks, including note taking and knowledge management, writing and outlining, journalling, GTD , research, and more. Developers are using it to explore ideas , create documentation , and log issues .

The more you store in it, the more useful it becomes. It’s not yet one of my primary tools, but it stands a good chance of becoming one. Perhaps it will become one of yours as well.

I’ve been a little disillusioned with the personal knowledge management space over the last few decades. In the early, wild days of personal computing, “second brain” applications offered interesting and unique ways of viewing and manipulating your data:

• Ecco Pro used a combination of tabs, outlines, and columns. Each column was a field in a relational database.
• InfoCentral allowed you to connect people, events, and objects in a way that could be viewed as an outline. Each connection allowed you to precisely define the relationship.
• DayINFO let you build impromptu fields and branches to describe each person and object. Each object could exist in multiple places within your network of knowledge.

Unfortunately, they were lobotomized in the 1990s. Many were purchased during the Office Suite Wars and dumbed down or abandoned because they didn’t appeal to the average, non-technical user. Promising newcomers have since arisen — Zoot and InfoQube , for example — but they haven’t gained much traction … until recently. Roam Research, Obsidian, Craft, and others are gaining loyal followings by offering enticing new features. Automatic backlinks is the one attracting attention.

Like all good apps, Roam Research is opinionated, written by Conor White-Sullivan to scratch his own itch. It’s an outliner with links and backlinks, is online-only, and intentionally expensive — to price it out of the reach of casual users.

It’s unusual in that it allows you to structure your data simultaneously from the top down and bottom up. Each page is an outliner, allowing you to impose structure on your information as you type, edit, and rethink. I love outliners and find Roam’s very fluid.

The ability to link separate notes also allows you to create structure from the bottom up as you notice relationships between your notes over time. This can lead to unexpected discoveries and is a central principle of the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, and one that Roam was built to encapsulate.

The methodology was created by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann as he used analog index cards to explore the relationships between ideas. It worked and was directly responsible for his prolific creation of around 70 books and 400 academic articles.

It’s built on the idea of anatomic notes written in your own words that contain just one idea. Structure is an afterthought and develops organically as you notice new relationships between your thoughts. You reference one note in another, and then create a backlink to the original note.

You can learn more by perusing Zettelkasten.de and reading the book How to Take Smart Notes , by Sonke Ahrens.

Here are the main concepts used by Roam Research. Use them as building blocks to design your own information system.

Outliner : each page is a single-pane outliner made up of hierarchical blocks of text and images. This encourages both anatomic and structured thinking. Command + Shift + Up and Down move blocks higher and lower. Tab and Shift + Tab change indentation. Command + Up and Down expand and contract the outline.

Find : the Find feature at the top of the page will find all pages containing a phrase. It also allows you to create a page with that name if one doesn’t already doesn’t exist, similar to the way nvAlt works.

Filter : the Filter icon allows you to show or hide blocks containing specific links on a page.

Boolean queries : queries are embedded in the outline and are a way you can ask Roam Research questions. Logical Boolean operators like “and”, “or”, and “not” are supported. Matching hits are pulled into the outline.

Links and backlinks : links allow you to create a system of networked thought or a personal wiki. You link to another page using [[wikilinks]] and a new page is created if it doesn’t already exist. Backlinks are automatically generated, and the context of the link is included, adding helpful information to the page.

Tags : in Roam, tags are similar to pages, in that every tag automatically gets its own page. As with pages, every page that contains the tag is listed as a backlink.

Embed : blocks from one part of Roam can be referenced or embedded somewhere else. You can also embed pages, websites, videos, and more.

Graph : a digital representation of the relationships between pages. Clicking on one page will color all related pages blue. Double-clicking a page will open it.

Markdown : Markdown is supported and is hidden until you edit a block. Unfortunately, it’s not quite standard. While **bold** text is created with double asterisks, __italics__ requires double underscores rather than single underscores or asterisks. Dynalist does the same and is probably the inspiration here.

Latex notation : you can add mathematical notation to Roam by enclosing Latex code inside double dollar symbols.

Code blocks : Roam offers code blocks with syntax highlighting. Start a code block with triple back ticks and a single back tick is used for inline code.

Slash menu : like Notion, Slack, and others, Roam offers quick access to features through a slash menu.

Sidebars : sidebars allow you to access information elsewhere in Roam without losing your spot. The right and left pane can be shown or hidden using Command + / and Command + \ respectively. Shift -click to open a link in the sidebar.

Components : Roam’s features can be extended using components, which currently include an inline calculator ( {{calc: 4 + 5}} ), word count, date picker, block/page embed, PDF embed, video embed, website embed, encrypted text, Kanban board, mentions, Pomodoro timer, and tables.

Your first step is to sign up for a Roam Research account. There’s nothing to download because at this stage it’s online only. Sign up for a Professional account that gives you a 31-day free trial, and if you continue on you’ll be charged $15/month or $165/year.

True believers can pay $500 for a five-year license, and there are discounts for full-time scholars, those under 22 years of age, and those experiencing financial distress. According to this Twitter post , the discount is 50%. It also mentions there may be a freemium plan in the future.

Daily Notes is the best place to put your random notes and to-do items during the day. Use it as an inbox for information that doesn’t yet have a home. Notice that in Roam, all dates are pages that you can link to. A new one is automatically created every day, and you can create them manually in advance using the date picker.

The first item in the navigation sidebar takes you directly to your daily notes. There are also links to view a graph or list of all your notes. Then there are shortcuts to any notes you want quick access to. You can add any note to your shortcuts by clicking the star icon at the top right of the page.

Add checklists to your notes by selecting TODO from the slash menu. You need to do this on each line; the next item’s checkbox won’t be added automatically.

The markup for a to-do item is actually a link to the TODO page. There are backlinks at the bottom of that page to every unchecked to-do item in your graph. Checking a box changes the markup to a link to the DONE page, and all completed to-dos will be found as backlinks there. If you think you’ll access your TODO page regularly, add it to your shortcuts.

I rely on the Pomodoro technique to stay focused, and I was pleased to find a Pomodoro timer among Roam’s components. These can be added inline using the slash menu, and a time of 25 minutes is added by default. The markup for the timer is a link to the POMO page, and at the bottom of that page you’ll find backlinks to them all.

Another place to explore what’s possible with Roam Research the help database . This is actually a public Roam graph and is accessible even to those who haven’t created a Roam account. Its content will tell you all about Roam, and the detailed changelog will give you an idea of how very actively it’s being developed.

What’s even more helpful is that it will give you a chance to explore the user interface. You can even create new pages and type content, but it won’t be saved permanently.

Start to intentionally use Roam and let your graph grow organically. The more you use it, the more useful it will become.

Use it for a variety of purposes. Link to other pages liberally. Experiment. Don’t worry too much about getting it right; you can rename and reorganize as your knowledge network grows.

Start by choosing a use case or two. You could use the daily notes to record what you plan to do each day and use checklists so that all of your open to-do items are collected on the TODO page. Alternatively, create separate pages of tasks for each of your projects.

Some users are taking task management to the next level (just browse the videos in this YouTube search ), using it for GTD, bullet journaling, and more. Todoist can be integrated , Asana’s My Tasks replicated , and Roam42’s SmartBlocks utilized .

Use the daily notes to record what happened during the day — what you accomplished and any highlights. Jot down your random thoughts, new ideas, and any good quotes you come across. If you refer to a date on another page, use the date picker so that it will be referenced in the backlinks of that date’s page.

Use Roam to store and develop reference information about your projects and interests. Try to keep each page reasonably short and add related information to linked pages. The use of links is what transforms Roam from a collection of separate notes into a network of thought.

You can publish your work using a Roam-native book (rBook). Two are available already on Roam Books , and you can learn more in this YouTube interview . Or plant a digital garden using tools like digital-gardeners , gatsby-digital-garden or roam-export . Roam Garden is a hosted alternative.

Roam also makes an excellent contact management or customer relations application. Viewing a person’s page will show you all other pages linked to that person. These could include appointments you’ve had with them, meetings they attended, tasks you assigned, bugs they reported, or projects you’ve done for them. Roam’s backlinks feature means that you’ll find all of the information you need exactly where you expect it to be.

Don’t be shy about adding data during the 30-day trial. Roam allows you to export all of your information in one step, either as a collection of separate Markdown files or a single JSON or EDN file.

Roam supports custom CSS themes , and there are plenty to choose some. Be aware that Roam’s rapid development may leave some broken. Better Roam Research is popular, actively maintained, and currently working. It offers system dark and light modes and accent colors.

Some themes add functionality. Azlen’s Roam Themes overlay pages on graph view (these unofficial patches apparently work), and Maggie Appleton’s Leyendecker mashes up the functionality of several themes. If you’re interested in creating your own themes, have a look at Maggie’s Painting Roam with Custom CSS guide.

You can now create templates natively in Roam to save time and ensure consistency when creating the same types of notes on a regular basis. Learn more . One creative use of templates is to create a Daily Tasks view on your daily notes.

There are plenty of Roam extensions and Integrations to explore. Here are a few to get you started:

• Roam42 is a Swiss Army knife that uses SmartBlocks to dynamically reuse text, supports human-readable dates, offers useful navigation shortcuts, and more.
• Readwise integration, Roam Highlighter , and Eloquent allow you to easily move formatted data into Roam.
• A browser extension for grabbing tab links formatted in Markdown with the title as anchor text is useful.
• Roam Research Markdown Links and Copy as Markdown bring formatted links into Roam.

Finally, Roam Depot , an official repository of vetted themes, plugins and features, should have been launched. Stay up to date by following @ RoamDepot on Twitter.

It’s still early days for Roam Research.

There are no desktop apps, no mobile apps, and no API. There’s no local storage (unless you’re a $500 believer) and no versioning, though automatic backup is now possible in Chrome or via the Roam2Github script, and you can now encrypt sensitive notes in place . It has a steep learning curve, is expensive, and a freemium plan is not currently being offered.

But it has a bright future. I’ve come across numbers of users who find its current price money well spent because it meets their needs better than any alternative.

It’s both powerful and usable, and the combination of outlining, linking, and embedding makes it suitable for a great many tasks. It’s under rapid development, and some of the missing features I listed when first outlining this article have already been added.

Is Roam Research for you? That’s a question only you can answer, and I hope I’ve helped you on your journey.

It has certainly grabbed my attention and I’ll be keeping a close eye on its development. Its popularity is inspiring other apps to improve by adding features like backlinking, and I’ll be covering similar applications in other articles.

The future of information management looks bright.

• Roam Research Weekly , a brew by Fabrizio Rinaldi, Mailbrew cofounder and Better Roam Research theme author
• Follow the #roamcult Twitter hashtag
• Effective Note-Taking With Roam Research , a free guided email course
• RoamBrain.com , an information hub for Roam Research
• A short (preliminary) guide to Spaced Repetition in Roam Research
• Extending my personal infrastructure with a data source featuring Roam Research
• How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
• Roam Multi-Part YouTube Course
• 100 ROAM TIPS: Beginner to Advanced in 25 Mins
• Next Level Functions in Roam Research (To-dos, Sidebar, Block Embed)
• Flexible Systems for Synthesis in Roam Research with Professor Joel Chan
• Implementing a Digital Zettelkasten using Block References in Roam Research with Beau Haan
• My Creative Workflow in Roam Research
• An in-depth look at Attributes in Roam Research
• How Nat Eliason Uses Roam
• Roam Tour with Rosie Campbell – Roam and Obsidian Workflow with Digital Gardens
• Roam’s New Page Embeds, Templates & More
• Roam Research: Shared Database Tricks
• Versions: Fundamentals of Roam Research
• Roam Research & Readwise Sync w/ Co-Founder Tristan Homsi
• Roam Summit – Session 1 – Maximizing Discoverability in Your Graph
• Roam: The Best Personal CRM Ever

What Makes Roam Research Unique Compared to Other Note-Taking Apps?

Roam Research stands out from other note-taking apps due to its unique networked thought approach. Unlike traditional note-taking apps that use a hierarchical structure, Roam Research allows users to create bi-directional links between notes. This means you can easily navigate between related notes, creating a web of interconnected ideas. This feature is particularly useful for complex projects, research, and brainstorming sessions where ideas are interconnected.

How Can I Use Roam Research for Academic Research?

Roam Research is an excellent tool for academic research. You can use it to take notes, organize your thoughts, and create a network of interconnected ideas. The bi-directional linking feature allows you to easily navigate between related notes, making it easier to see connections and draw conclusions. You can also use the graph overview feature to visualize your network of notes, which can be helpful for understanding complex topics.

Can I Use Roam Research to Write Code?

Yes, you can use Roam Research to write code. The platform supports code blocks, which you can use to write and store code snippets. To create a code block, simply type “/code” and select “Code Block” from the dropdown menu. You can then type or paste your code into the block. This feature is particularly useful for developers and programmers who want to keep track of their code snippets.

Is Roam Research Suitable for Students?

Absolutely. Roam Research is a powerful tool for students. It can be used for note-taking, studying, project planning, and more. The ability to create bi-directional links between notes makes it easy to see connections between different topics, which can be particularly useful for studying and revision. Additionally, Roam Research offers a student scholarship program, making it more accessible for students.

How Can I Use Roam Research for Project Planning?

Roam Research is an excellent tool for project planning. You can use it to create a network of interconnected tasks, ideas, and resources. The bi-directional linking feature allows you to easily navigate between related notes, making it easier to see the big picture and keep track of your progress. You can also use the daily notes feature to keep a log of your daily tasks and progress.

Can I Collaborate with Others in Roam Research?

Yes, Roam Research supports collaboration. You can invite others to your graph and work together on notes and projects. This feature is particularly useful for team projects, where multiple people need to contribute and stay updated on progress.

How Secure is My Data in Roam Research?

Roam Research takes data security seriously. All data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and the platform uses secure cloud storage to store your data. However, as with any online platform, it’s important to use strong, unique passwords and take precautions to protect your account.

Can I Use Roam Research Offline?

Currently, Roam Research requires an internet connection to access and edit your notes. However, the team is working on an offline mode, which will allow you to access and edit your notes without an internet connection.

How Can I Organize My Notes in Roam Research?

Roam Research offers several features to help you organize your notes. You can use tags to categorize your notes, and the bi-directional linking feature allows you to create a network of interconnected notes. You can also use the graph overview feature to visualize your network of notes, which can be helpful for understanding complex topics and seeing the big picture.

Can I Import My Notes from Other Note-Taking Apps into Roam Research?

Yes, Roam Research supports importing notes from other note-taking apps. You can import your notes as a markdown or JSON file, and Roam Research will preserve your formatting and links. This feature makes it easy to switch to Roam Research from other note-taking apps.

Adrian Try is an Aussie writer, musician, cyclist, and tech geek.

What’s the buzz behind Roam Research

You’ve got to really love note-taking apps to stumble upon an epic beef in the  personal knowledge management  world. In 2018, Evernote users began migrating to the “all purpose tool” Notion . However, barely a year later there’s a new kid on the block: RoamResearch creating a productivity geek’s own version of East Coast vs West Coast.

What is Roam Research?

Roam’s Conor White-Sullivan describes the app as “A note-taking tool for networked thought .” The app’s been under development for two years and has already garnered an eye-popping list of power users who go by the #roamcult . And to see the beef in action, you have to look no further than shared tweets between  Tiago Forte (from Building a Second Brain) and Conor White-Sullivan (Roam’s creator ).

Even RadReaders threw their hat in the mix, with messages coming at me via Slack, Twitter and DM.

So what’s the beef? How does it work? And should you try?

It’s a battle of ideologies, not tools

What this  note-taking beef  highlights shows the inherent tension of any system to collect ideas.

• Is your knowledge organized  associatively  or  hierarchically ?
• Do your notes hold their own in  isolation  or mandate  inter-connectivity ?
• Are you more of a  hedgehog  or a  fox ?

The famous  Isaiah Berlin essay  distinguished hedgehogs as seeing the world through world through the lens of  a single defining idea , whereas foxes reversed engineered a worldview  from distinct observations .

Zettelkasten’s been around for a while

However, this ideas’s been around for along time. It’s got a crazy name that I can’t even pronounce:  Zettelkasten  (German for “slip box” or “card index.”) And like GTD, the PARA method and Bullet Journaling, it’s a system. One that works with physical note cards, or tools like Roam, Evernote, and Notion. (In fact, one of our students from our Notion course played with the  Zettelkasten approach in Notion .)

What’s the verdict on Roam?

The core idea behind Roam is bi-directional links. Imagine if you could tag any paragraph (or image, or bullet) within a note and then string together all the graph of relationships through these links. Effectively, you’re creating a mini-web of every idea fragment you’ve ever had. Here’s my explanation of bi-directional links and where Roam shines:

[su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/3GG0Ck14ISM” width=”1600″]

For a writer, that’s extremely compelling. I know I’m aways trying to create a patchwork of zeitgeist ideas, anecdotes, quotes, and emotions in the perfect post. With Roam, you could have tags for each of these buckets and when it came time to write the post, could visualize the “tree of ideas.”

So if you were to look up the list of idea fragments for the tag #story, you’d see the following screen:

So for now, I’m super-intrigued by Roam, particularly for the messier part of my brain that I tap into for writing. Right now, my Notion editorial setup is super Foxy (i.e. hierarchical) and it could benefit from a sprinkle of Hedgehog-iness.

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Roam Research: The only tool for networked thought

i’ve been searching for a note taking and knowledge management tool for a while now. my goal had been to find one solution that could handle both. i basically wanted everything under one roof.

i tried Notion – it was a bit too clunky for me. i couldn’t quite get into the same groove with it that other people were claiming to get into. i gave myself a bit of time to warm-up to Notion, but after a few months, i still couldn’t do so. i found myself making my way back to my Google Docs and Sheets setup with Todoist mixed in. 

then i tried Dynalist, but it was too structured. it felt overly regimented. though, i’ll admit, i may not have given Dynalist enough of a chance. it was difficult to continue ignoring #RoamCult and Nat Eliason continuous Roam tweets. so…this was more than enough ammunition to convince me to give Roam Research a shot.

before i get into this,  keep in mind that i don’t work for Roam and i’m not being paid by Roam to write this article.

Roam describes itself as a tool for networked thought. it’s got so many great use cases. some use it for research (which i believe was one of its original intentions), some for planning and todo lists, others for note taking and personal knowledge management.

Roam has seemingly endless capabilities as it’s built on principles for versatility. 

on e of the biggest attributes through Roam has been the ability to develop your metacognition. simply put, metacognition is “thinking about one’s thinking”. it refers to the process used to plan, monitor and assess a person’s understanding and performance. metacognition includes an evaluative awareness of:

• a person’s thinking and learning  
• a person as a thinker and learner  

at the core, Roam is a tool that helps bring these aspects to fruition. it helps a person “connect the dots” within a giant knowledge web. well, “giant” pending how much you actually add to your database. a user is able to add notes and the subsequent connections between them are what forms your web.

Conor White-Sulliva n , the founder of Roam, calls Roam a dynamic knowledge repository

page creation in Roam

because deciding on where to “file” a page within Roam is non-existent, you can literally create pages for no reason at all and not worry about where to “store” them.  

to further explain, the beauty here is the fact that you don’t need to worry about categorizing pages in a specific fashion or within a certain hierarchy. 

the way you create and store pages in Roam is the same way you store thoughts or ideas in your mind. they just exist. Roam is directly aligned with the fundamental operations of human thought. 

this leads me to my next thought…

Roam is powered by bidirectional linking

if you ever wanted to effectively collect, examine and file notes on any given subject and relate one to the next, then you’ve now found a product that will let you do so. Roam is a sort of portal to your digital brain. it is a note taking powerhouse and one of the best applications to use in order to mirror your mind. it won’t necessarily think for you, but you will be able to store all of your thoughts in a place other than your mind and show precisely how they relate to each other through bidirectional linking. 

bidirectional links are a core idea of Roam. 

bidirectional linking allows a system to deduce the inverse relationship between two entities. for example, if a includes b , then b is part of a . the two entities can function in two, usually opposite, directions. 

think about a time when you were doing research about a subject on Wikipedia and then all of a sudden realized you had followed a series of links from one page to the next and ended up on an unrelated subject.

sure, the final subject may initially seem completely unrelated, but there was at least some relation between each of the subjects on your way down that Wiki rabbit hole . this phenomenon is bidirectional linking.

it’s important to realize that each note in Roam becomes a node within the Roam knowledge map.

links between pages are created using either [[page]] or #page. if a page that you referenced already exists, a link between the page you’re currently writing in and the page you referenced will be formed. if there is no corresponding page, a new page will be created and linked to from the page you’re currently writing in.

every place where an idea has been referenced will show beneath that page.

Conclusion about Roam

in my opinion, the fluidity of note taking within Roam has been one of the main attractions. that coupled with the ease of connections between nodes gives me the feeling that i am quite literally dumping my brain into a “ second brain ”. 

if you haven’t already read the Roam White Paper , i recommend doing so!

How to use Roam Research for academic research?

Back in 2021, I started using Roam Research (which I'll refer to as Roam) as my notetaking tool. In a previous article titled "Why I Use Roam," I detailed the reasons behind this decision. In recent years, a host of new notetaking software has exploded onto the scene. This trend has sparked interest in different notetaking methods. Therefore, choosing a notetaking tool means choosing a notetaking method.

So, how can Roam or similar software be used for academic research? There are plenty of articles out there on how to use Roam, with most focusing on the card note-taking method, which emphasizes the individuality and reusability of notes. However, fews focus on using Roam for academic research. In this article, I aim to share my experience of using Roam for academic research, from notetaking through to writing articles. The key doesn't lie in mastering the card notetaking method but in developing a suitable note framework based on one's own research practices to closely connect notetaking with research activities.

Key Concept: Two-Stage Notetaking

Initially, notes serve to consolidate our reading and reflection. Eventually however, the notes themselves warrant further exploration, reevaluation and organization, to generate newer notes. Consequently, notetaking typically involves two stages, which I call Stage A and Stage B.

Stage A notes are the raw notes, which could be literature excerpts, reflections, or even an image or a link. In my case, Stage A notes primarily consist of literature reading notes.

Stage B notes are refined notes, representing a secondary process where notes are taken on the raw notes. In my case, I extract specific concepts or issues based on the literature reading notes or establish links between different Stage A notes.

Put simply, during academic research, I first read numerous pieces of literature and take notes. Then, based on these literature notes, I extract relevant concepts or issues for further exploration. This is a common practice across any note-taking tool, including traditional paper notes. However, Roam has improved the efficiency and elegance of this process.

Research Practices: Three Projects

Before I started using Roam, I spent a week designing a note framework tailored to my own learning and research practices. The essential point here is that you should establish a note framework according to your own studying or researching pracrices . My personal research pracrices involves regular in-depth reading of literature, reflecting on and organizing the literature, drafting fragmented thoughts, and eventually writing.

My research zeroes in on the philosophy of law, a category of humanities theoretical research. If you're familiar with theoretical research in humanities, you'll know that texts , authors , and concepts are three fundamental pillars of any research in humanities. Philosophical and social science theories deal with these three basic projects every day. What exactly does a classic text convey? What are the thoughts of a classic author on a concept? How should a classic concept be understood? Moreover, these three pillars are intertwined: the thoughts in a classic text revolve around particularly important concepts, and the ideas of a classic author undoubtedly involve a certain classic text and the concepts it expounds. Different authors discuss the same concepts, and so on.

Before the introduction of Roam, organizing notes around these three pillars was neither very convenient nor elegant. For instance, using traditional notetaking software meant creating many documents or pages, with linking them together for two-stage notetaking proving complex.

However, Roam solved these issuess with ease. Each note in Roam is essentially a webpage, making referencing between them as simple as creating a link. Roam even displays the links established between them. Therefore, Roam has considerably improved the convenience, efficiency, and elegance of conducting research, particularly in humanity fields.

Note Framework

Once the research practices are clear, the note framework can be designed accordingly. Start by creating several root projects (or if you prefer, "nodes" or "pages"), namely "Texts," "Authors," and "Concepts." These three projects can serve as both Stage A and Stage B notes.

Roam advocates often mention that you don't need to care about the tree-like relationships or hierarchies between notes. Generally, this is correct. However, it's still necessary to establish some root note projects. This is not only related to the form of note organization but also involves the essence of research practices. Roam precisely combines the form of note organization with the essence of research practices. (Of course, in my case, I also established some transactional root projects outside of core research, such as "Issues," "Submissions," "Projects," "Interests," etc. Since these are not the core issues, I won't mention them further below.)

These root projects are typically fixed on the left sidebar of Roam. Their content is not determined all at once but changes over time. My daily note-taking process is as follows:

Add new projects in "Texts," typically are literature that is being read or awaiting reading.

Make reading notes within these texts projects. These projects constitute Stage A notes.

At a future specific time, read Stage A notes, and open or create new projects on the right sidebar. For example, while researching Stage A notes and wanting to summarize key points or issues about a particular figure, whether it's the author of the current text or related authors. You can also create entries for related concepts or issues. These entries will be opened on the right sidebar.

Here's an example. As shown in the image below, the entry "Taking Rights Seriously" (《认真对待权利》authored by Dworkin) is one of my Stage A notes. When writing to a certain extent or at a specific time, I may create or open the "Dworkin"（德沃金） project on the right sidebar and then extract, organize, or summarize certain key points.

You may notice that each node within the "Dworkin" project starts with a "daily notes" node and a simple title. This is because the information we have about a author, concept, or issue, as well as the thoughts we develop based on it, are not complete or final. They undergo a process of addition, deletion, and revision. Therefore, leaving a timestamp for Stage B notes can reflect this real process. Additionally, at different times, we may contemplate and organize the same or similar issues. For example, in March of last year, I contemplated Dworkin's views on the issues of the individualization principle of rules, based on the Stage A note "Taking Rights Seriously," and in October of this year, I may contemplate this issues or a similar one again. Still, there's no need to go through the "Dworkin" entry, as I can directly write a new entry. The note-taking software will record and display possible connections between them. When further organizing in the future, we can also compare thoughts from different periods.

Furthermore, notes on different issues may be taken at different times. For example, on February 2, 2022, I may have researched both Dworkin's views on the issues of the individualization principle of rules and read Raz's "The Concept of the Legal System," which involves this issues. At the same time, I may have checked H.L.A Hart's views in "The Concept of Law," or many other issues. These issues may generate Stage B notes, and when each entry has a timestamp, opening the corresponding daily note link in the future can provide an aggregation of what research we did at some time, which is likely highly relevant.

In summary, Stage B notes involve the extraction, organization, and expansion of Stage A notes, and it's not a one-time process. Over time, the information we have about related issues and the thinking process will change. Roam helps us reflect this process.

It can be seen that literature notes in the root project "Texts" are usually Stage A notes, while notes in the root projects "Authors," "Concepts," or "Issues" are usually Stage B notes. One small trick is that during the process of creating a concept list, if entering a concept in "[[]]" doesn't prompt a selection, then it's a new concept. In this case, it needs to be added to "Concepts." Also, for added convenience in adding and retrieving, both "Authors" and "Concepts" are organized in order of letters in an alphabet. The concept list aims to be concise, and maintaining such a list may not seem useful in daily, but it's a process of building one's own knowledge system and network.

From Notes to Writing

We already have two stages of notes. Stage A notes are generally used for the material of Stage B notes (we may also reference Stage A notes extensively in Roam's Stage B notes), and they can also be used as material for future writing. Meanwhile, Stage B is mainly used for future thinking and writing. For example, we may already have a lot of content for the "Recognition Rules" in Stage B notes. If you want to research this concept, you can open this project and explore all the Stage A or Stage B notes associated with it.

How to realize the process from notes to writing in Roam ? The key is to do a good job with the two stages of notes. The better you do with Stage B notes, the more convenient your future writing will be. In my case, I often write many lengthy thoughts in Stage B. Sometimes in the process of taking notes, some ideas are very novel or deep for a certain issues, and unconsciously, I write a lot. So, I simply create a new writing project in the "Projects" root directory and expand it into a blog post, even into an academic paper.

Here, the key is not the so-called card note-takeing method. All you need to understand is that according to such a designed note framework, Stage B notes are not only able to connect with Stage A notes and other Stage B notes, but also can be repeatedly used, arranged or modified in future note-taking and writing . If you want to call these Stage B notes "card notes" or "permanent notes", there's no problem.

Technical Issue: Writing Papers on Roam

Many people believe that Roam is only suitable for note-taking and drafting short articles. How do we go about it if we want to write a paper in Roam? Can Roam's outline editor handle this task? Yes. Over the past years, from writing few paragraphs to writing blogs and papers, I have done all on Roam.

Firstly, for writing with simple formatting requirements, Roam can export any node as a Flat Markdown document. For those who rely on the outline editor to think and write more orderly, writing on Roam is a vital need. Of course, if you don't have such dependence, the rest of this section is unnecessary to read.

Secondly, Roam still can handle writing with complex formatting requirements, but with the help of LaTex . LaTex fits any text editor, including Roam's outline editor. With appropriate markings, LaTex can generate a paper with complete format upon compilation.

Common LaTex markings are "\footnote{}", "\textbf{}", and "\textit{}". For images, lists, or tables, I suggest leaving corresponding markers when editing on Roam, and adding them later in the specialized LaTex editor. On Roam, you only need to write the main text and don't need to add full LaTex markings. Using the template feature Roam provides, you can easily call up commonly used LaTex markings, as shown in the figure below.

In this way, write the main part of the paper in Roam, along with necessary LaTex markings. When finished, export it as a Flat Markdown document and continue to edit in a specialized LaTeX editor.

Maybe your tutor asks you to submit a Word document for review. A convenient way to convert Tex documents to Word documents is required. Pandoc offers can heplp you. Firstly, use Pandoc to prepare a Word document template and then use Mricosoft Word program to adjust the formatting of this document template to the format required for the paper. Then, use Pandoc commands to convert the Tex document to a Word document. Since it is not for official paper submissions, Word templates don't need to perfectly match the paper formatting requirements. Of course, theoretically, Tex documents can be converted directly to Word documents without further formatting adjustments, as long as you're willing to spend enough time adjusting the templates and Pandoc commands. This technical detail is not the main topic of this article, and I will elaborate it in another article if possible.

This article outlines how to do academic research on Roam, using the author's own study and research practices as examples:

First, the basic issues of note-taking should be established: two-stage notes should be created, and the initial notes should be organized and digested for further thinking and writing in the future.

Second, establish a note-taking framework in accordance with your specific study and research practices. The note-taking framework is the basic root directory on the basis of which all notes are organized, and the process is also a research process.

Third, by taking good two-stage notes, you will be able to realize the process from notes to writing.

Finally, in order to be able to complete the research and writing process on Roam for complex issuess, other technological tools such as LaTex, Pandoc are needed.

In conclusion, we should establish a note-taking framework, take good two-stage notes, and use the notes for writing based on a clear understanding of our own learning and research practices.

• Edge for Scholars

Enhancing Productivity with Roam Research

As a healthcare researcher and academician, my professional life feels like a labyrinth of ideas, data, and endless streams of literature I should be keeping up with. It’s a realm that demands meticulous organization and a strategic approach to information management. If you’re looking for a way to do that, consider Roam Research  – a tool that has become my compass in this maze.

Why Roam Research? Imagine having a personal assistant who not only helps you jot down ideas but also intelligently links these ideas across a vast network of information. This is what Roam Research does for me. It’s more than just a note-taking application; it’s a central hub where my thoughts, readings, and research findings coalesce into a meaningful whole.

A Daily Ritual of Notes and Reflections: I begin every day with Roam Research. I capture fleeting thoughts, summarize new findings, and outline out the day’s agenda. It’s a ritual that brings order to the chaos. At the heart of the software is a database of bi-directional links. When you want to convert a word or phrase into a concept that can be linked, you simply put double square brackets around it & voila, it has its own page stored in the database, and every mention of that concept is linked there.

Project Pages: Here’s an example of how this is helpful to those of us in academic research. Each project is a universe of its own – with unique objectives, timelines, and tasks. I use Roam Research by creating a dedicated page for each project. This page becomes the central hub for all project-related notes, from brainstorming sessions to detailed plans, and is tagged with [[Project Todos]]. It’s a dynamic space that grows and evolves with the project, ensuring that all my thoughts and tasks are coherently organized and easily accessible.

But of course, I’m always working on multiple projects. I can go to the [[Project Todos]] page where I get a bird’s-eye view of all my projects and can survey everything at a glance. It aggregates all tasks from each project into one comprehensive list, providing a panoramic snapshot of my entire project landscape. This powerful overview helps me prioritize tasks and manage my time effectively, ensuring that no project is left behind.

Categorizing Tasks: To plan my day/week, I actually have several lists I review at the beginning of the day: [[Paper Todos]], [[Grant Todos]], [[Work Todos]], and [[Personal Todos]]. Each category is like a stream of thought, collected into a reservoir of tasks that I can dive into depending on my focus for the day. This categorization helps me maintain a balance between various responsibilities, ensuring that I devote attention to each aspect of my academic and personal life. I also have a [[WaitingFor]] List, which is a unique system I use to track dependencies – tasks that are on hold because they require input or action from someone else.

If you’re not convinced yet, here are a couple other hacks that make my work a lot easier:

• Literature Review: Managing my scientific literature in Roam Research is akin to curating a personal library. Each paper, tagged with relevant concepts, becomes part of a searchable, interconnected database. This system has revolutionized how I access information make it readily available through a simple query.
• Recalling Meeting Discussions & Thoughts: During meetings, when a crucial point about a study is discussed, I tag it with [[Limitations Section]], [[Methods Section]], or even [[Acknowledgements Section]]. This method ensures that when I’m ready to draft a manuscript, a simple query of [[Title of Paper]] and [[Limitations Section]] brings forth all the relevant discussions, neatly linked and ready for review.

Pricing: I wish I could say it’s free, but given all the bells and whistles, including its reliability, I see why they charge for it. Depending on how frequently you want to pay, it costs from $8.33/month (if you purchase the 5-year Believer Plan like I do) to $15/month (if you chose monthly).

Conclusion: Roam Research is more than just a tool for me. With Roam Research, my daily organization transcends mere to-do lists; it becomes a form of art. I have created structured yet flexible spaces for each aspect of my work and life. It’s not just about getting things done; it’s about knowing and navigating the landscape of my commitments. It’s an extension of my thought process, a way to navigate the complexities of academia, research, and even my personal life with greater efficiency. It has redefined how I organize my academic life, turning the potential chaos of information overload into a structured, manageable journey.

If you want to learn more, here are a couple 10-min reads written by others:

• How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition
• A beginner’s guide to Roam Research: getting started in 5 easy steps

Tips for Conquering the Literature

Order from Chaos

How to Do It All by Not Doing It All

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I am an assistant professor of nursing and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University and have interests in clinical decision-making, informatics, prediction modeling, human factors, & implementation science. My research interests focus on the design, implementation, and evaluation of tools that support clinical decision-making for outcomes where probabilities can be assigned.

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• How I use Roam Research as a PhD Student

Posted by Sankalp Garud | Sep 23, 2021 | Note-taking , Productivity | 0

(This article was originally published on Sankalp Garud’s website .)

A few months ago, I started using  Roam Research  for managing my personal notes. On the surface Roam looks like a traditional outlining app, but underneath it comes with a powerful feature: bi-directional linking (every bullet point or bullet list can be linked to each other).

This is much like hyperlinking on the internet, except what you’re linking are your personal notes. Here is how I use Roam to help me think better and create more.

As a researcher, a significant amount of my time is spent on reading other people’s research. What are the classics of the field? What are the shiny new developments? Research is built on other research and this is where Roam’s bi-directional links shine.

For instance, I was figuring what questions to include in my psychology survey. I found some past research that had a questionnaire that I could simply use, but it was long and we did not have space to include all of it. Further, I found another study that narrowed the original questionnaire by collecting their own data, which I eventually included in my study.

In Roam, I have pages for both of these studies which link to each other, and I can follow the logic of why I included the shorter questionnaire. When I write my thesis in a year or so, I will be easily able to follow and explain my logic to include the questions I eventually included.

A snippet of how my scientific paper notes look like. I based my decision on Wise and Dolan (2020) who use arguments from two other papers, both of which are separate pages in my Roam database. When time comes to justify my decisions, having these linkages will help.

A large part of my first year of PhD was in lockdown and most classes were on video. I enjoyed taking notes on Roam because I could pause the video, write my notes and pace my learnings. Of course, what I learned in one lecture often built on something from the previous lecture, which Roam is perfect for (for eg. functional MRI uses HRF, both of which are linked pages in my Roam).

SUPERVISOR MEETS

I meet with my supervisors every week to discuss progress and findings. Throughout the week, I accumulate many discussion points which I neatly note down on my “Supervisor Meeting” page in Roam. During the meet itself, I go through all the ‘to discuss’ points I noted during the week and then note their responses to it. After the meeting, I go through my notes and create concrete to-do’s in  Notion .

DAILY RITUAL

Every morning I start with writing three things I am grateful for and I end every day writing three wins (wins are usually some tasks I completed for my DPhil, but the wins also include interpersonal wins like “Said no to Sarah’s invitation”). I am now experimenting with adding a daily highlight  to my ritual, and also a  morning dump .

A snippet from my daily note for today. Notice how I just wrote this article in my daily note. I did not have to switch to a different software, and reducing that friction can make the difference between an idea and a complete blog post!

BOOK NOTES AND REVIEWS

As I read a book, I dictate notable quotes into Roam using the mobile app. After I finish a book, I also write my thoughts on the book as stream-of-consciousness bullet points. Without even thinking about it, I have the structure of a book review ready. I then use these bullets to write a  review for my blog . Much easier than starting from scratch.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Using Roam has genuinely improved my productivity. I am unsure if I am doing a lot more, but I am certainly doing things better. I’m listening to lectures better, I am reading books better, and I am documenting better.

The pricing is on the higher side, with plans priced at $15/month. I personally got a scholarship as a student and if you apply you may get it too. If pricing is still an issue and you don’t mind being a beta user, consider Athen’s Research, which has all the main features but is open source and free.

About The Author

Sankalp Garud

Sankalp is a DPhil student, podcaster, and blogger. He is currently studying at the University of Oxford for his D.Phil in Experimental Psychology. He has a master's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL, and a bachelor's degree from Ashoka University. He also likes to dance and play the guitar. Visit Sankalp's personal website at sankalpgarud.org and follow him on Twitter at @sankalp35 .

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Getting compound interest on your thoughts with Conor White-Sullivan

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Welcome to the third instalment of Mindful Makers, where we interview highly creative people and ask them what they think about creativity, productivity, and building products that matter in today’s connected world. In the previous editions, we chatted with Buster Benson and Khe Hy . Today, we are pleased to take a deep dive into the thoughts of Conor White-Sullivan, founder of Roam Research .

Conor has lived many lives already, lives that involved connecting the dots and approaching challenges in novel ways, which may explain his obsession with finding interesting intersections within a knowledge graph. He studied anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, taught classes on stoicism and practical philosophy, created an online town common which was acquired by AOL, and worked on special projects at the Huffington Post, reporting directly to Arianna Huffington. He is now fully focused on Roam, a note-taking tool for networked thought—and, in my humble opinion, the best metacognition tool out there.

You’ve been working on Roam, or at least the concept of Roam, for quite a long time now. What inspired you to start building this tool in the first place?

I was originally interested in figuring out how you could figure out what’s actually true online. Wikipedia is still bottoms up with institutional news. Their trust still comes from legacy. A thing that gets vetted on Wikipedia has to have first been published in the New York Times or some other third party. And I didn’t think that that was going to work going into the future. So, the first problem that I worked on was trying to do this for hyper-local politics.

The idea was that you had the people who actually lived in a town able to crowdsource the pros and cons of any policy change that was going to happen in that town. You could bubble up the best ideas for an idea, or the best ideas against an idea, or for a local candidate or against a local candidate, etc.

But the more we did it, the more I saw that storing ideas as just strings of text doesn’t actually allow you to do any of the more challenging work. Especially if you have a large group of people and no one person’s going to be able to read everything that every single person says, you need a better way to actually see the structure of arguments, or the structure of trade-offs in a decision, or all the competing factors in the decision.

I eventually figured out that a simpler problem to solve was: how does one person take 20 different people they’re reading and start to create some sort of synthesis or math-like map of the idea space, across a bunch of different books that they’re reading, or a bunch of different observations or conversations that they’re having, and gradually be able to index into the individual things? So somebody else who is reading their synthesis can check and say, “Is this summary actually reflective of the underlying idea?” Or, “Does point A actually imply point B?”

The specific thing I found really helpful was Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book”, where he talks about this idea of syntopical reading. There was a project in the 50’s. It was called the Great Books Series, where this guy, Mortimer Adler, and I think it was Encyclopedia Britannica, they got all the books of western canon and they indexed all the places in Hegel and Kant and John Locke and all of those classic books of western thought, and they indexed all of the different ideas that were being brought up in there.

And they summarised the core ideas and the core differences of opinion across all these different people and then indexed back to where in each of these books it’s said. I thought that that was a really cool project that would be a lot better if it was digital. And it would be a lot better if it wasn’t just these 50 books based on this editorial decision made that those were the 50 books that really mattered. I was like, “I want the syntopicon or synopticon for physics and for ontology and for the Vedas and Upanishads and things that aren’t just in the western canon.”

Those were where some of the original ideas came from. We’ve always wanted to build a layer on top of the web where every person can have their mental model of how the whole world works, and they can start to share ideas across everything.

You’re mentioning two different planes almost. You first mentioned speed of thinking, but taking notes and creating an archive of your thoughts—that encourages depth of thinking. How do you see Roam helping with connecting the two, thinking fast and thinking better?

I think that you need to be able to get compound interest on your thoughts. Good ideas come from when ideas have sex: the intersection of different things that you’ve been reading or different things you’ve been seeing. So you can have better ideas faster if you are actually reviewing the old things and you are building up. You’re not throwing away work.

A lot of times people forget everything they read in books and they’re not often able to think, “Oh yes, this thing that I just read reminds me of this book that I read six months ago, or two years ago, or five years ago.”

I think solid foundations do make you faster in the long run. That’s the core idea in the Zettelkasten. You move a little bit slower as you go through a book. But you get some nuggets of thought articulated that then end up allowing you to produce, and when it comes time for you to write something, it’s much faster because you have already done a lot of the work ahead of time. And so you’re not duplicating it over and over again.

That makes sense. Talking about building a foundation… I read a tweet from Tiago Forte recently where he was saying that after a while, when you’ve been taking notes for a long time, the extra benefits of new notes start to wane. You don’t need to take as many notes anymore because you keep on reusing what you’ve written about before and just connecting the dots instead of taking more notes. Do you think that’s the case?

I don’t actually buy that thesis. I guess it depends on how far into new territory you’re trying to push yourself. If you learn the pentatonic scale and you learn how to play blues guitar, you can just be like, “Ah well, now I know those fundamentals and so I’m just gonna play blues all the time. And I don’t need to learn new stuff because I’ve got a steady repertoire and I can bang out great blues riffs really easily.”

But you can also keep doing the same deliberate practice and keep the same level of intensity if you’re pushing out into new territory and then you’re incorporating those new notes. I would actually say, as you get a more developed Zettelkasten, you get more evergreen notes.

Then one new thought can generate seventy new thoughts, because there’s more stuff to connect it to inside. So I think the connections can increase. You might take longer when you have a new idea to connect it up to all the old things you’re thinking about, but it can generate more new insight. I read one new observation, and then I can generate more new insight because I’ve got a larger set of things to compare it against.

That makes sense for finding links and connections inside of your own notes. But Roam also allows you to also collaborate with other people and connect the dots across a team. So how does that work? 

Right now, Roam offers real-time collaboration, so you can have multiple people in a single workspace. I think the real opportunity for us is when you can share notes across databases and across workspaces.

If we project ourselves in a year, or two years or whatever, and technology is not an issue, how do you imagine this working in the future? If we’re taking the grandfather of Roam—Wikipedia— with lots of people collaborating on content and connecting the dots. They have a slow moderation system, and there are politics involved because you need to decide what edit is going to be more relevant than another. How in the future do you see all of this work with Roam? 

I see a pretty strong difference from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has this idea that it is possible to get to a single source of truth. Through that slow deliberation, moderation process, there’s a neutral point of view and there’s one thing which just reflects reality, and I think that’s completely bullshit. Roam’s a bit more post-modern in its perspective on how truth works.

It’s more similar to a federated Wiki. Ward Cunningham, who invented Wiki, realized that Wikis don’t allow you to deal with original research. So, what we’re more interested in is, if I like some of your thoughts on meta thinking, if I like some of your thoughts how to use Roam efficiently, and you’ve made those thoughts public and you’ve made this reusable, I can just grab them and put them into my workspace. And if somebody trusts me, they can be listening to my workspace, and they can then grab your notes from me.

And you don’t need to worry about some slow, deliberate, moderation process. If somebody trusts me, it’s much more like Twitter. When I think about the future of collaborative thinking, I think more about how Visakanv uses Twitter of just threads on threads on threads. When he’s making threads, he’s re-tweeting himself, he’s re-tweeting other people, he’s searching through Twitter to find the appropriate tweet for each thread. That’s more what I think about rather than a slow, deliberate system.

What I like about this approach is that I don’t need to trust you because I can go back and click and click and just go back to the source and decide if I feel like that’s a good source or not.

You might need to trust me if I’m the source. If I’m making an original observation, then you need to decide, “Okay, do I want to listen to what Conor is saying about… “

But I get that choice because if everything is linked together I will eventually get back to the original source, so I can decide if I trust you because I will find you, which currently is very hard on the Internet, right? To find out who was the original person who had that thought.

Yup. And you can see if somebody has a critique. There’s a lot of complicated design problems for us to solve when you’re thinking about the multiplayer version of it. But they are still very related to the problems that we have to solve right now. I’ve got a collection of a hundred backlinks that relate to knowledge management, and I’m deciding which of those backlinks I’m pulling up into the body of the page itself. And so taking this big noisy buffer of potentially useful thoughts and then figuring out how I want to structure it and figuring out which one of those basically should be elevated to the body of the article.

Yes, I’m often faced with the same dilemma. Let’s talk about fun use cases. Either as a team working together or an individual, what are some of the most creative use cases that you’ve seen so far using Roam? 

One of the things that pops to mind is somebody who created a Roam page for every ingredient in their house and then they had another page where each of those ingredients had a check box next to them. They would reference the ingredients in the individual recipes they were using. They were able to see just by opening up their recipe page what they already had all the ingredients for. That was a pretty creative use case that sort of was practical.

When I think about creative use cases, the people who are using it for space repetition is pretty interesting, where they’re taking advantage of the fact that you can expand and clap bullets and set a date for something so that it appears in the back lines of a future day. This way they are able to set up basically flash card systems so that they can get information from their second brain into their first brain. That’s been another pretty creative use case that I have gotten a big kick out of.

That sounds amazing. What about discoverability? When I re-read old notes, it’s either because I’m clicking on a link, either one I proactively created or a bi-directional one that was automatically created, or because I know exactly what I’m looking for. But once we think about the multi-player paradigm, how do you think about discovering stuff that other people created? 

Right now we’re focusing on just helping you re-discover old notes that are relevant. There’s a lot of workflows around that, around how do you take raw temporary notes. We encourage people to use the daily notes and to brainstorm and brain dump, and just write all the things they’re thinking.

I think that the first thing that we’re interested in is, how do you build systems so that it’s easy for you to take those and gradually refine them? There’s a combination of the tool, and there’s the habits people have around the tool. So people are using it for actual knowledge gardening. 

You need to have a habit of tagging something as a to-do to synthesize the idea further, and then periodically go back and review those and write them in a more crisp language, or build up your evergreen notes so that you have this library of thoughts that you are able to get that compound interest on.

There are a bunch of design challenges we’re working on. And there are a lot of things that are going to make it easier. You can do crazy linear algebra stuff over text to find related notes, even if they don’t use any of the same words. So I think there’s definitely a lot of opportunity there for suggesting possibly related notes, but the act of a person seeing the connection themselves as opposed to some algorithm seeing the two words are connected, I think is pretty important, because that’s where you get more insight. The process of drawing the connections is pretty important. So you can’t really automate these things away. The act of drawing the connection yourself is a valuable thing that we don’t wanna take away from people.

I agree. This is why it’s a proper second brain and not just a separate storage place. I want to finish with a topical question. What are some ways you think people can use Roam right now to address some aspects of the pandemic?

There are a bunch of scientists using the tool right now. We actually initially bootstrapped the company by working with a bunch of people in the field of AI research, particularly AI safety. So folks who were at the Center for Existential Risk, and Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and Center for Effective Altruism were some of the earliest people that we were building the tool for. So I talked a lot when we were doing research studies with folks who are modeling pandemics. Hopefully they’re still using Roam and they’re still using it for mapping out their thoughts and figuring these things out.

But I think for most people, if you’re not an epidemiologist and you’ve never done anything in biology, supply chains, or manufacturing, now probably isn’t the time to just start trying to teach yourself everything, to jump into the fray.

Instead, I think it’s a crazy opportunity for people to do deep work, because a lot of the other normal distractions of daily life have been removed. Isaac Newton basically invented calculus when he was in quarantine, Shakespeare wrote King Lear. There are lots of good precedents of people being able to do wild work because they had the time alone with their thoughts. So I don’t think right now is a time for people to just suddenly be like, “I’m going to address this plague.” But I do think it’s a time where people can think about what comes after this. The world is going to look really different.

I mostly think of it as a sort of a window of opportunity for a lot of people to get to spend some time on deep work or just play-work. A lot of times it’s like everything has to be some side project, or some side hustle or some business to get into, but this is a good time for you to think about religion, or mythology, or reading the books that have been on your shelf for forever that you actually want to dive into, and get into some philosophy. I also think it’s a great opportunity to learn a skill that you’ve wanted to learn for a long time.

Thanks so much, Conor! If you want to learn more, here are the other articles in the Roam Research series:

• How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition
• A beginner’s guide to Roam Research: getting started in 5 easy steps
• Roam Research: a simple input to output flow
• Roam Research and mindframing for world curation
• +Roam browser extension for Roam Research

And I highly recommend following Conor on Twitter .

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