Thread by @PhilipSkogsberg

What makes @RoamResearch more powerful than most other note-taking tools?

It's not just bi-directional linking and graphs.

Thread: 👇

It's Daily Notes.

More specifically how the design of the UI for interacting with Roam Daily Notes fundamentally changes the UX compared to pretty much any other note-taking tool, even those also built on-top of wiki-style graphs.

It's the design choice to have Daily Notes as the main/first interaction with the app.

Every day you get a new daily notes page. The cursor just sits there blinking and invites you to write something.

The fact that there are no other hints aside from the current date makes it easy to understand what you should do.

You should write something about what you're thinking of, doing, or planning - today.

The continuous flow of daily notes, one after another gives you a simple way to move through your notes temporally, backward or forward in time.

It's the #GTD tickler file on steroids. Daily and Weekly Reviews are built-in.

The other thing that makes the Daily Notes structure in Roam so powerful and inviting to use is that it forces the user to let go of the instinct to try to create hierarchical trees of folders and topics to organize the information.

The software doesn't just suggest to you that hierarchies aren't needed, it actively inhibits their formation. All you have to do is continue writing new stuff every day, linking and tagging your notes as you go.

The UX and UI of Roam push you to focus on writing, on capturing your thoughts and building up your knowledge from the bottom-up.

The affordances nudge you in the direction of creation rather than to spend time thinking about how to organize all your notes.

If I would try to let such an order emerge naturally in something like Evernote, just dropping all new notes into one large folder with no deeper hierarchy I would quickly start to feel very anxious. I wouldn't trust the system.

In Roam that is never the case. This is a result not just of how easy it is to link blocks, notes, and pages to each other.

But also a result of how the UX design quickly reassures you that you don't need to worry about organizing your notes.

Ironically, by making you focus so much on different ways of organizing your notes Evernote doesn't help you with you really want, which is to organize (and improve) your thinking or writing.

Roam starts with a different premise, it helps you build a network of your thoughts. And an adequate organization will emerge on its own.

cc: @RoamBrain #roamcult ✌️