Roam. A brain-friendly note taking app

I've seen the future. It looks exciting. It's a piece of software. It's called Roam. Roam Research launched a test version of its new note-taking software in late 2019. It was free to use. Everyone started going crazy about it, resulting in them having to, in their words, "Close the gates of Roam" to new users. Their service is cloud-based, so the servers were getting overloaded.

The good news is that it fully launched this month as a paid service. At first glance, the $15 per month cost seems a little steep for something that you would just take notes on. Apps like Evernote, Notion, and Microsoft OneNote do a great job at less than a third of the price.

It works like your brain

So what's the big deal? Well, I've been researching and trialing it and discovered that it's so much more than a simple note-taking program. It has tagging features like the other apps, but its links are bi-directional. Everything can link to everything else....just like how the brain works. You are not time consumingly putting items in folders (There arent any!) hoping you'll be able to find them, and you don't have to worry about which tags to use.

You build your external brain as you go along. You can create a Page for anything and everything you wish, rather than the rigid structure of folders. Any page can link to any other page, so it almost like having folders and tags fused together.

Here's the other clever bit. When you pull up one of your pages, it not only shows all the pages that you've linked it to. It will list all the non-linked notes related to that page name. And at the click of a mouse, you can link any of those notes you wish to that page.

Why use it?

All very handy if you are writing a report, book, newsletter, blog, presentation, course, essay, dissertation....the list goes on.

But there's more. There's a growing movement called The Cult of Roam. People are starting to use it for all kinds of things. I've started to use it as my CRM database to keep track of all my conversations with my personal and work contacts. I just create a page for every person. All my conversations and notes will be date stamped too.

In Roam you write all your notes in the daily notes section, as you go through the day. Simply creating Pages or tagging notes to pages as you go, if you wish. So I've started using it for my journaling. Popping my thoughts down whenever I pause for a few minutes. Checking in with myself and clearing my head.

Goodbye Todo app

I'm also using Roam for my Todo lists. You can simply create checkboxes for anything you wish to do and mark it for a specific day. It works great if you use the GTD Getting Things Done method too. My Todoist app is redundant, I'm not sure I'll ever go back to it. My second brain is all in one app!

Ok, not everything is in it. I still have all my email/messaging apps and my calendar separately, but a large chunk of what I do is in Roam. If you want to have a play with it I suggest having a 14-day trial, plus checking out Roam's own tutorial videos, and videos by others on Youtube.

Head to www.roamresearch.com to explore. If you use a Mac and prefer your data just stored locally, also look at www.obsidian.md which is its biggest rival at present.

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An Introduction to Metacognition