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About one year ago,
I made a video about what I thought
were the best note taking apps in the world.
Quite frankly, the amount of research I did for that video
almost drove me insane, but guess what?
We are back, baby!
And that is because there is a new note taking app
on the block which has a small but dedicated base of users
who will tell you it is the best note taking app
that has ever been made.
The tool is called Roam Research
and after getting a not insignificant amount of tweets
from you guys telling me to check it out, well,
that is exactly what I did.
(dreamy EDM music)
I've been using Roam for about the past two months
on a pretty much daily basis, putting it through its paces,
so in this video, I'm gonna be breaking down what Roam is,
how it differs from other note taking apps,
and giving you some pros and cons so you can decide
whether it's worth testing out for yourself.
So when you start using Roam,
the first thing you're gonna notice
is that when you're creating pages here,
everything is essentially a gigantic bullet list.
And if you're used to tools like WorkFlowy or Dynalist,
you're gonna be right at home
with how you actually take notes.
Everything's a bullet list.
You can kinda drill down as much as you want.
And what I've found is this kinda bullet list structure here
encourages me to write a lot more
when I'm in research mode for video
than I would if I was using Evernote.
When I research with Evernote,
I eventually end up with just a gigantic amount of,
I don't know, research vomit on my screen
and it gets very difficult to find certain things
after I've written them.
But with Roam, everything can be organized
through a couple different functions.
First, if I don't want to see everything,
say I don't want to see everything
in this Work from home tools section here
'cause I'm workin' on a different part of this outline,
I can just collapse it, which is great.
So I've already made my Crafting your environment video.
Let's just collapse that.
I've already made my Planning and prioritization video.
Let's just collapse that.
Let's say that I'm in in the research process
for my time and motivation video,
which actually just came out a couple of days ago.
I can just kinda minimize everything else I want
and work here, which is great.
But if I really want to focus in
on this specific part of my outline,
I can actually just click that bullet
and that kinda becomes the top part of my page.
So it's still part of this page
and I have some breadcrumbs here
that show me sort of where I am within my document,
but this is all I wanna see
and this is all that I'm gonna see, which is pretty nice.
So, so far this is looking kinda like WorkFlowy or Dynalist,
so what's the difference?
Well, the key difference lies in how pages link together.
See, Roam is a tool for bottom-up associative thought.
It is not a tool for hierarchical top-down organization,
unlike almost every other note taking app
that you're going to use.
So the way that you would do this
is you simple put brackets around a term
and if that term is a page,
it's going to create a link to that page.
If it is not a page,
it's going to actually cerate that page.
So let me go ahead and find something
within this document that I wanna link to.
I'm pretty sure I had mentioned
I want to make a huge YouTube course some day.
Kinda a goal of mine, not a super huge priority right now,
but, y'know, I wanna do it.
And I happen to know that I created an outline here in Roam,
kinda brain dumping some ideas.
So if I highlight this YouTube Course term right here
and I just give it brackets,
it'll actually give me suggestions
of pages that already exist, in this case, just one,
and I can click it and I've created a link.
So if I go ahead and just click this,
it's gonna take me to my YouTube Course brain dump here.
And if you look at the graph overview,
which is another kind of unique element of Roam Research,
you can see that when you create these links,
you start to get this gigantic web of interlinked pages.
Now, before we go any further into Roam's feature set,
I wanna talk a little bit about the point
of this linking system.
And I was doing a lot of skating
while I thought through the structure of this video,
so I'm just gonna play some footage of that here
to make it look a little bit more interesting.
But when you think about the way
that your brain organizes information,
it's very much a tangled web of ideas,
which is itself made up of a tangled web of neurons.
And whenever you have a realization or you get an idea
or even when you get a rush of emotion
about a certain experience,
different neural networks start to connect to each other.
As the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb famously put it,
"neurons that fire together wire together".
And the more connections a group of neurons has,
the more frequently you access it
and the stronger the knowledge it stores becomes
in your mind.
And Roam seems to be built to emulate this way
in which the brain works.
And it's also very similar
to an analog system with the exact same purpose
called a Zettelkasten, which was created
by the German social theorist Niklas Luhmann.
Luhmann was incredibly prolific,
writing over 70 books and over 400 academic papers
during his career.
And he managed all of his knowledge using a wooden file box
that contained thousands of paper note cards,
each of which represented a specific idea
and linked to any other card which mentioned that idea.
Now, while the analog Zettelkasten system
used this very complex system of numbers
to link the cards together,
Roam makes things infinitely easier
by simply linking the pages together
when you create those bracket links,
or even when you don't.
And this is actually one of the key features of Roam
that makes it really, really nice to use.
Any time you mention a page,
so lemme just type the word books in here,
because I have a page called Books,
any time you mention the name of a page within your text,
even if you're not thinking about it,
you create what's called an unlinked reference.
So if I go over here to Books,
I can go down here and see four linked references.
But if I open up this little menu here,
I'm gonna get nine unlinked references.
And these are just any instances within my Roam database
where I have typed books
but I haven't put the brackets there
to actually link them to my Books page.
Now, sometimes I don't really wanna make a link
because I'm just saying the word books,
but if I do want to make a link,
I can come in here, I can look at my unlinked references,
and I can just click link for any one of them.
And now I've actually made that link.
So if I go back
to my How To Work From Home Effectively series,
then books is now linked to the Books page,
where I'm actually tracking all the books that I'm reading.
And this is at least one of the features of Roam
that has the fans of this apps calling it
a complete game changer
because it kinda gives you an opportunity
to go back in, interact with the notes that you take
and the concepts that you have learned
and taken notes about multiple times.
Instead of just taking notes and then having them be siloed
in some far-flung sub-folder of your hierarchical system,
you are constantly linking the new notes that you're taking
back to older notes.
And, again, over time you get this very complex
tangled web of ideas.
And you might be wondering, well, what's the point of that?
And it all has to do with associative thinking.
When you combine multiple disparate ideas,
well, that is when creativity happens.
I mean, think about a piano.
Let's take a guitar and hit the strings with hammers.
Boom, you've got something different.
Or how 'bout, y'know, rollerblades?
Let's take shoes and put wheels on them.
When you take disparate ideas
that haven't been connected before
and you give yourself tools for connecting them,
then you have more insights and you become more creative.
So that seems to be kind of the whole point
of the underlying kind of bottom-up linked structure
of how everything works here.
Now, before I move on from linking,
I think people in the comments would roast me
if I don't mention this next point,
which is that pages are not the only thing
that you can link together.
Anything that is a block, or I guess a bullet,
can be linked to any other bullet.
So let me give you an example of that.
I have one called Working From Home: How to Stay Focused.
Okay, let's say I want to link to this
from some other part of my outline down here.
Maybe I'm working on another section on Work/Life Balance.
Cool, so lemme just say I wanna link to that other thing.
All I need to do is instead of typing brackets,
which link to pages, I will type parentheses and then boom!
Now, before you click away from this bullet,
you're going to see just a key reference
to that specific block
and the moment you click away from it,
boom, it is now a block reference
and if I click it, it is going to zoom me right to it.
And this is a very, very long bullet list,
so I'm gonna scroll to the top.
But as you can see, this is that exact subsection
of this page and I've zoomed to it.
More importantly, now that I've created a block link,
I now have this little number six here
and if I click that, I can see in the sidebar here
any time I have mentioned this specific block
within this page.
And I guess that actually brings us to the sidebar.
The sidebar is one of my favorite things in Roam.
So basically, I can bring up any other note within Roam
in a sidebar next to the note that I'm working on.
So let's just say I'm over here on my Books note
and I don't want to click into one of these books,
I just wanna look at it in a sidebar.
If I shift-click it, it's just gonna bring it up
and then I can interact with it
in the exact same way that I would over here.
Now, of course, there are some cons to using Roam.
There are gonna be a couple here
that may be deal breakers for certain people,
the biggest of which is that at present moment,
there is no dedicated mobile app for Roam Research.
There's no Android app, there's no iPhone app.
Now, that being said, there is a workaround,
which is that you can bring up Roam Research
in Safari or a mobile browser and it does work pretty well.
And I think they kinda know that the mobile experience
isn't super great at the moment
because, by default, when you first load up Roam
in a mobile browser,
you're gonna get the little Quick Capture box
and anything you submit to it gets synced
to your Roam database later on
and it gets put under a Quick Capture tag.
So if I actually go and show you my Quick Capture thing,
these are all things that I've just typed out
as I've been out and about,
going about my business, using my phone,
not having access to my computer.
So it does work, it's just not the most elegant system
in the world and I think it's gonna change in the future.
Con number two, there is also currently no API,
so if you are, say, an Evernote user
and you're used to lots of integrations
with, say, document scanning apps like Scanbot
that lets you easily scan receipts
and other kinds of stuff into Evernote,
you're not gonna get that here
and you're not gonna get any other kind
of integration right now.
There's also not optical character recognition, or OCR,
so you're not gonna be able to scan your handwritten notes
and digitize their text.
And also, this is not Notion,
which means you don't get some of the really cool features
from Notion, namely the amazing tables and database things.
I do believe you can create tables within Roam,
but they're very, very simple
and they absolutely do not hold a candle to Notion,
where I can do multiple views,
I can create templates for my databases,
I can do all kinds of really, really cool stuff.
So, personally, Notion is stickin' around
for many different purposes,
not least of which project management.
Also actual video scripts,
'cause, again, I love to format them like this,
I love to have tables of contents,
all kinds of cool stuff.
But Roam is awesome for research, which kinda makes sense,
'cause research is in the name.
So that is what I've been using it for
and I've been outlining my videos in it
and it has been a great tool so far.
Now, one of my additional main uses for Roam
has been to take detailed notes from books,
because I've been in the habit of getting up every morning
and spending a little bit of time reading.
And when I read non-fiction,
I actually mark up the book with pen.
I know that's gonna be sacrilege to some of you,
but, for me, marking up the book with a pen
allows me to highlight things
and kinda makes the book more valuable overall.
It also forces me to really engage with the material
and pay attention to it and I know if I am daydreaming.
Anyway, once I'm done with a chapter,
I will go over to Roam, I'll go back through my book,
and I will write detailed notes,
which I can actually show you right here.
Here are some of my notes from the book Hyperfocus.
I'll write my notes based on the highlights in my book.
And writing these super-detailed notes has, number one,
helped me to actually learn better
from the books that I'm reading
and retain the information more effectively
but, number two, it has given me a ton of ideas for videos,
a ton of great research for videos.
So overall, this is a great habit to be in
and it's definitely one that I'm going to keep up
going forward into the future.
And if you want to build your own strong habits
and actually stick to them, then I'd recommend going
and taking my habit-building class over on Skillshare.
This is a class that will show you how to break your goals
down into small, actionable habits
and then show you how to set up systems
that will help you stick to them over the long term.
And turning tasks that take willpower
into habitual actions that really don't
is a huge part of achieving your goals
and I worked really hard
to make sure that my class will help you do just that.
Plus, it's on Skillshare,
which means that if you are one of the first 1,000 people
to sign up at the link below,
you're gonna get a two-month free trial
and you're gonna be able to take that class for free.
You'll also have access to thousands
of other great classes on Skillshare,
including my friend Ali Abdaal's new
evidence-based masterclass on how to study for exams,
plus classes that can teach you new skills in video editing,
public speaking, illustration, and lots, lots more.
Premium membership on Skillshare starts
at less than $10 a month,
so it's also a very affordable platform.
And, once again, if you're one of the first 1,000 people
to sign up with my link in the description down below,
you're gonna get a two-month free trial
with unlimited access to the entire platform.
So that is it.
Thank you so much for watching.
And if you wanna learn more about Roam,
my friend Nat is actually the one who introduced me to it,
probably via his incessant tweeting about it,
but he's got a great overview article
that you may want to check out,
so I'll link to that in the description down below,
along with the Roam Research sub-Reddit
and a couple of tutorial videos
that you may want to check out
if you really want to dig into it.
Beyond that, I'm interested to hear what you think
of both this app, but also note taking apps in general.
What are you using these days?
Are you doing it on a computer?
Are you doing it on an iPad?
Are you back to a regular pen and paper system?
Let me know in the comments down below.
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