Thread by @ccneill

Been a while since I talked about @RoamResearch. I'm not constantly discovering as many cool new things about as I once was, I'm just _using_ it now. Every day, almost without fail

I just read a blog post about how it's supposedly not easy to know where to put things in Roam, or to find them later. I agree to this extent: the search bar could use some love. But otherwise I don't really understand the complaint

I take a lot of notes on books and podcasts. I have a specific tag that I use in my daily notes, and I either just link to a page for a book/paper and take notes there, or I write some brief metadata for a podcast and take notes in a block under it

Here was one of my first entries like this, and a more recent one

The first one isn't terribly helpful unless I want to answer the question "what did I listen to on Day X" or "when did I listen to Podcast Y"

So I changed my approach. Easy

The second version:
• does not require a page for every episode, nor any thinking about where to put my notes
• points me to the people involved, relevant tags, URL to the episode, and my notes; this takes maybe 30 seconds
• can be easily searched later, as I'll show

Let's say I remember something about UBI I want to look up, but I forget where I heard it. I go look at linked references on the UBI page

I see not only the specific references within the episode notes, but the episode itself

What if I only remember that I heard an interesting interview with someone on @HiddenForcesPod a while back? Or I can't remember what podcast Yang was on?

Again, go to the Hidden Forces page or the Andrew Yang page, check references, and there it is again.

What if I'm looking for a quote on inflation from a book, but I can't remember which one?

I break them up with e.g. [[bookquote]] [[quote]] (direct quote) [[podcastquote]] etc - you can decide if you care about this

Here's one, from The International Monetary System 1945-1981, from Giscard d'Estaing. I could have found it as a direct quote, a book quote, or from his name

But wait, that first screenshot doesn't have the word "inflation" anywhere in it

Ah, it's from the parent block

I could do something like this, and not only find every relevant quote, but every book, podcast, etc where I saved a quote about inflation

You might protest, "but what about [some specific tagging I didn't think to do in advance that I might miss]"

I just.. start doing it. I spend ~0 time worrying about this. It's all there somewhere, and I have lots of breadcrumbs to find what I'm looking for

I've mostly stopped trying to sell people on #RoamCult. Some friends found it as useful as I do, most couldn't see the need

I never use the graph, I wish I had a back button when on mobile, the search bar isn't great, tagging adds some minimal overhead, but I still love it

I use it all the time to find podcast episodes and quotes I want to share with friends. Also, as you might have noticed, I did all of this on mobile

If you don't care about re-reading notes, maybe all my tagging looks absurd. That's cool, use what works for you

I have noticed a weird, persistent hostility towards Roam that I don't really understand. Maybe it's a reaction against all the early enthusiasm and proselytizing, I dunno. But I'm still using it, and I suspect I'll thank myself for it in the future. We'll see!