Thread by @Conaw

So @SamCorcos from Levels is currently visiting the Roam Compound and <shock horror!> he uses Notion...

Gracious host that I am, I provided MULTIPLE reasons Roam might just not be a good fit for him yet, but he INSISTED on showing me a video of workflow

Whoa boy was I wrong

🧵

Video is a 10 minute walk-through of ONE of his routines - prepping calls the night before they happen.

Again, I try to stop him - Not only do I rarely prepare for calls, I ask folks not to schedule them and to call randomly instead.

We're different!

loom.com/share/13f19596…

It may be strange - but these days - no joke - I do pretty often tell folks that Roam might not be a good fit for them right now.

You can't be everything to everyone - and some folks just have different priorities.

In the case of Sam, my judgement was wrong.

If you've been using Roam for a while - or you have a friend who is deep in #roamcult -- you'll probably see at least 5 ways that this process would be easier, and much much faster in Roam.

But right now, you have to figure WAY too much out on your own to see this.

So, talking with Sam was a bit of a wake up call. Concretely it gave me 3 new ideas for how we could make life better for folks like Sam.

one of them will almost certainly be focus for the next round #RoamGames Sunday

Knew I'd think of next one on time :)

Alright - so what's the big deal?

To get the right answer, you have to first ask the right question.

In 1957 - the question JCR Licklider asked was

"How much of our thinking time is spent thinking, versus preparing a context for thinking?"

JCR Licklider, a professor of psychoacoustics at MIT, tried to answer the question for himself

The answer he found was "Not Much"

Only 15% of his time was spent doing real thinking - the rest of it was necessary prep

@hrheingold brings the history here

rheingold.com/texts/tft/07.h…

In '57 - Licklider saw that scientists were spending the bulk of their time doing "Clerical and Mechanical" work.

"Searching, Plotting, Calculating .... preparing the way for insight"

If you like having a computer, and the internet, you can thank "Lick"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._…

To go back to the original video - you can see @SamCorcos spending about 10 minutes to prepare for 2 calls -- and he had a lot more than 2 calls scheduled.

Are his calls likely to go better because of the prep?
ABSOLUTELY

Is it work better suited to machines than humans.
YES

So, alright then - so what's the cost? A few hours per week?

It might be that for Sam - and even if it's just that, that's pretty high - but for there's something even more scare than time...

Attention.

Before I saw the video, Sam and I were talking about Context Switching.

He told me how much he hates it.

I figured this was another reason he might not like Roam, since I EXPLICITLY designed it to make it easy for me to capture as much value from random tangents as possible.

If you've been following me for a while (or God help you you've had to work with me) you may have gathered this already...

but I'm not really a shining pillar of structure and regularity

The ONLY working style I've found that works for me is one where I can "Ride the Lightning"

Like Dave Chapelle says, when an idea takes over, it's the one driving, sometimes I'm in the passenger seat- but more often I'm in the trunk.

Most productive moments, days, weeks of my career have felt like this.

https://twitter.com/gonzalo__nunez/status/1324400949037727745?s=20

So so often - I've found that if I don't seize the moment and get an idea flushed out - it escapes me.

Or it'll take 3 months dragging before I find myself with enough energy to do something that in THAT moment was the most exciting thing in the world.

This style of operating has not made my life easier -- as you can imagine, I was not the greatest student - when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD in my teens, doctor told my mother I was one of the most severe cases he had seen.

"How did he get into college without meds?"

Barbell theory of invention is not talk.

You know how I know Roam is good for folks with ADHD?

Because for years the shitty pre-cursor versions of Roam were the duck tape and rubber bands that held my life together. As it has improved, so has my life.

https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1292294098188038146

To the idea that Roam is not for everyone

if you're the Type A striver who already has a system for everything, and has no struggle following it on a daily, hourly basis -- the first thing you'll notice about Roam is that it takes more effort to make your workspace pretty.

Main thing I noticed with Sam's workflow - if I were to take it up - that is not a few hours lost per week - it is quite possibly days.

Every time I saw him jumping back and forth to email - I saw a chasm of distraction waiting to swallow up the rest of my afternoon.

On that note - I'll wind up the thread with the ideas that came from seeing that demo.

1. Searching Email for Unlinked References.

I've seen @RoamHacker query dictionary.com - proprietary databases, and just about everything with an API in his alternate sidebars

I'm confident that an mvp of "Unlinked References in my Email" is within the reach of roam/js

2. Proper aliases, user defined schema, and semantic entities

More specifically - a proper way of connecting people, institutions, email addresses.

For inspiration there - I recommend steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/univer…

Would LOVE to see a #roamcult video showing what this routine would look like in Roam.

https://twitter.com/maskys_/status/1358280270684688384