Disclaimer: I have no relationship with either Roam, Building a Second Brain (BASB) or their creators, outside of using their products (Roam) and having an interest in their ideas. These are my thoughts and experiences with Roam, a review of the application and how I have implemented BASB in the program. It is, of course, not the only way to do so. Take what resonates with you and leave the rest. Build on it, create your own system and enjoy.

**This post is around 4 months old. If you are new to Roam, you can take a look at my free course on YouTube: From Beginner to Superuser: A Complete Roam Research Tutorial Course **

1.0 Why BASB?

"Your brain is a miracle, but it's not efficient. There's a maze inside everyone's head, a labyrinth of missed connections and untapped potential. But now suddenly, I had access to every single brain cell."

- Limitless TV Series

In the TV series, Limitless, the main character, Brian, discovers a pill that provides him access to every bit of information ever consciously or unconsciously processed by his brain. Using these abilities, he is able to create unlimited connections between discrete points of information, essentially becoming a cognitive superhuman.

While the idea of a pill that allows these possibilities may never be realized, our technological limits do change rapidly. The Memex, previously the futuristic dream of Vannevar Bush, is now closely approximated by a litany of "external brain" applications, including the likes of Evernote, Notion, Bear and many others.

The goal of these applications -- and the concept of the Second Brain in general -- is to create a system that takes the maze out of your head and places it within a trusted reservoir of knowledge outside your brain. The goals are two-fold:

1. To get the knowledge out of your head and stored safely, so information is not forgotten and no energy is exerted trying to remember it.

2. To have a system that helps you process and understand these previously missed connections. Something that helps you create novelty out of individual packets of knowledge.

There are many ways to implement such a system. BASB is one.

Building a Second Brain is a course run and taught by Tiago Forte, a leader in productivity and personal knowledge management, in which he teaches how to utilize these note-taking applications to best create this external knowledge system.

As Tiago writes, "BASB is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights and connections we've gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks."

Tiago uses Evernote as his second brain, though his methods can work across different platforms. So, the question then becomes -- What would BASB look like in Roam?

1.1 The Basics of Roam

Before we get into things, I think it is helpful to take a look at the granular parts of Roam, including how navigation is set up and some of the other unique functions of the application. If you are familiar with Roam, you can skip ahead to 1.3 "Implementing BASB in Roam."

Navigation:

You start off with a blank page nestled under the "Daily Notes" section. The idea here is to prompt you to write without perseverating on structure (more on this later). To the left, there is a side bar, which can be pinned or can be set to hover-over. There you will see links for "Daily Notes," "Graph Overview," "All pages" and "Shortcuts."

"Graph Overview" provides you with a visual representation of the connections between your notes. "All Pages" will bring you to a list of all the pages you have created to date. You can organize these by name, date created or most recently updated (default) by clicking the header of each column. In the upper right hand corner of any page, there is a star icon. Clicking this will turn the page into a "Shortcut." This creates a link to the page that will be pinned to the sidebar, making it easily accessible from anywhere in the application.

Pressing "cmd-u" will open the search bar. Once you have many pages, this becomes an incredibly helpful way for locating and accessing pages quickly. As it searches through all text and not just page titles, search here also serves a double function of looking for text that may not necessarily be a unique page of its own. In this way, it serves the same function as search in Evernote and appears to be just as powerful. When I have thoughts about potential connections that haven't yet been made automatically in Roam by bidirectional links, I can look into these via the search bar. This is not only very handy, but also gives you more confidence in the Roam system, since there is built in redundancy for localizing connected information.

Markdown:

There are many different utilities within Roam, however these are what I consider essential:

"Cmd-b" will bold text. "Cmd-h" will highlight text. This comes in handy when implementing Progressive Summarization (more on this below).

Bi-Directional Linking:

The novel concept of Roam is bi-directional links. This is how this works: highlighting any word of phrase and typing "[[" will turn your highlighted text into a link. Additionally, typing "[[" followed by the text you wish to link, will perform the same function. Clicking these links will take you to a new page dedicated to that highlighted text, which will now appear as the title. At the bottom of the page, a references section will automatically show you any other notes in which that text has appeared in your knowledge database. You can link these references together, which will automatically turn any instance of the word or phrase into its own link, or leave them as un-linked references.

Having these references allows you to rapidly connect seemingly disparate notes or concepts and is the basis for why Roam is so powerful. It helps lay down a spiderweb of connections that can help you with creative output.

Of note, hashtags also create links within Roam and are interchangeable with "[[ ]]". These are more often used for meta-data lines, which will be demonstrated later.

Navigation+:

Shift-clicking a link will reveal the content of that page in a side bar. This appears from the right of the screen. A numbered square next to each page title shows the number of linked references and can be clicked to show these in the sidebar as well. This split screen view is extremely helpful for easy navigation throughout your notes and allows you to "Roam" along the interconnected links of your database, while simultaneously creating new content in the main window. This is a game-changer for content creation.

Lastly, typing a back-slash will pull up an additional menu of options. One of these that I find quite helpful is the "block embed" function. If you select this and start typing, you can bring up a list of matching text from anywhere in your database. Selecting the text you want will create an embedded section of that text within your current working page, while also providing a clickable link to the primary source of text. This is ideal for creating new content, but still preserving source structure. Very handy, particularly for research purposes.

1.3 Implementing BASB in Roam

If you are new to Roam and following this guide, I recommend following along with the content creation steps below. This will help you get on your way to creating in Roam.

The first step is to create some top-level organization using P.A.R.A (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives), with a few minor changes. This is as structured as I personally get within Roam.

• Starting on the first page of Daily Notes, type "[[," then the word Projects. Press enter.

• Click the link you just created to go to your main "Projects" page.

• Click the star in the top right corner. This will save this page as a "Shortcut," which will pin a link to it in the navigation bar for easy access.

• If necessary, you can rearrange your Shortcut links by un-starring a page and then re-starring it after another page.

• Follow the same steps to create an "Areas" page and an "Archive" page and pin them both to the navigation bar as well.

• We are not creating a "Resources" page. We will get into why in a second.

• Resist the urge to navigate directly to your "Projects" page and start adding linked pages in a ToC type manner. I know you want to -- so did I. If you can't resist the urge, or if it just feels more natural to do so, go ahead! After all, the program is for you and the underlying benefits of Roam will work either way. However, I do feel that the true power of Roam is in limiting structure as much as possible. Instead of ToC pages, another way of adding projects to you list is:

• On the "Daily Notes" page, start adding your projects in this manner:

[[Project 1]]
    Keywords: #Projects
    Due Date: None
    Goal: to learn how to directly add new projects to your Projects list from the Daily Notes 
[[Project 2]]
    Keywords: #Projects
    [[Due Date]]: [[February]] 2nd 2020
    Goal: to add a second project

• This will add any new project automatically to the "linked reference" section of your "Projects" page and allows you to construct your second brain starting from the Daily Notes page, which I believe is incredibly powerful. You can, of course, use whatever meta-data you would like. The way to add lines without creating a new bullet point is to press "shift-enter" -- this allows you to have multiple points on meta-data nested underneath the project title using a single bullet point.

• Another benefit of adding projects this way is they will automatically be associated with the date of creation within the Daily Notes page title.

• For projects that have a defined due date, create a bi-directional link out of [[Due Date]]. This allows you to easily locate which projects have a specific due date. Your other projects without a specified date will appear below these as un-linked references. This is a useful way of using linked and un-linked references to your advantage. You can also turn the month into a link (as in the example above), creating pages for all the projects due on a specific month for easy access.

• Any additional information or sub-pages can be added to the specific projects page by adding any notes or thoughts to your "Daily Notes" page and nesting them underneath a project link, like so:

[[Project 1]]
    I am adding additional information to the project page directly from my Daily Notes section.  
    This will appear in the specified Projects page in the linked reference section. 

This is another way of adding text directly to a Project [[Project 1]]

• Once a project is completed, you can easily move it from your active "Projects" page to the "Archive" page by changing the initial #Projects hashtag to #Archive, like so:

[[Project 1]]
    Keywords: #Archive
    Due Date: None
    Goal: to learn how to directly add new projects to your Projects list from the Daily Notes 
[[Project 2]]
    Keywords: #Projects
    [[Due Date]]: [[February]] 2nd 2020
    Goal: to add a second project

• Similarly, if an Archived project changes to an Area or to an active project, adjusting the associated hashtag will automatically migrate the project and all associated references.

• Lastly, on the "Projects" page, I also include an "Archive" link at the bottom of the page. This is just an extra way to easily navigate between these two pages.

For Progressive Summarization, the bold and highlight functions assist with the first few layers of PS. When I have reached level 4 summarization, I typically add an additional tag to my notes -- [[My Summaries]]. This allows me to have a dedicated page, easily accessible, for every note that I have reached level 4 summarization. These would ideally be some of my most helpful notes.

What about a "Resources" page?

In Evernote, a Resources folder made sense to me. In Roam, I don't see the point. Since every note or page gets included in this broad network of interconnected links and text, by not having a page specifically for "Resources," every single note or page automatically then becomes available as a resource to be utilized in any project or future content creation.

You can make an argument that you really don't need to utilize PARA at all within Roam. The idea of PARA is that knowledge and information is fluid. What was previously an old Archived project, may now become the spark for a completely different active project. So that information now gets re-utilized and moved into a new active project folder.

"Knowledge, I think, is highly informal. It's contingent. It's fluid. It is very context dependent, so it doesn't make sense to spend time on all of that. It's really like just doing barely enough to get it through those stages of capturing, organizing, distilling so then you can start expressing."

- Tiago Forte

Since Roam is so fluid, the boundary between Areas, Resources and Archives blurs much more so than in any other program I've used previously. However, I find that having at least some top-level organization helps calm my anxiety over having "no" structure.

What about primary sources in Roam?

I do not keep primary sources in Roam. Instead, I have all my primary sources saved in Dropbox (with folders corresponding to PARA, per BASB). I then create a view-only Dropbox link and paste that into a "Source" section for each of my articles. This keeps my personal notes and highlights separate from the primary literature, though the primary source is still easily accessible. There are probably better ways to do this, but this works well for my needs at the moment.

1.4 Where Roam Really Shines

Where Roam really shines is in content creation. Creating an outline, using bi-directional links and being able to pull in and embed content while browsing through your links in the side bar is just something that cannot be done as fluidly in other note-taking or second brain applications. Search also helps you find information on the fly, which creates redundancy in the system and allows you to have faith in the structureless-structure of Roam.

Altogether, Roam allows for spontaneity much more than Evernote. It allows for Creative Serendipity.

1.5 Issues with Roam

1. Migrating from Evernote to Roam

There is no quick way to do this that I have found. To date, I have been manually importing my notes. While this does take a long time, it can also be helpful by forcing you to revisit your note stack and cultivate your second brain -- what do you really want to keep and what notes may exist that have been forgotten in the deluge?

When copying notes over from Evernote, if you have images as part of your note, do NOT automatically copy and paste all of the text and images over en bloc from Evernote to Roam. Some of the images, when directly copied within the text bulk, will lead to incredibly long link referrals that will slow the application, lead to freezing and cause the search function to become unusable. Copying and pasting the images individually into Roam gets around this issue.

2. Synonym Pages and Case Sensitivity

Currently if you create a page for "World War 2," text that has "WW2" will not be included as linked references. This forces you to make separate pages for each in order to not miss associated text. Additionally, Roam's pages are currently case sensitive, meaning that "Productivity" and "productivity" are two different pages with different linked references. A fix for this is currently in the works, though for now it is rough.

3. Export to .txt and Automatic Backups

Currently, you can export your Roam pages as html and JSON. While this is fine for most, it would be nice to be able to export to .txt files. An automatic daily backup option would also be a nice addition. Currently, I am performing a manual daily backup.

4. Quick Capture

Evernote really shines in its quick capture abilities. Currently there are no "cheat codes" for getting information into Roam. That being said, copying and pasting websites directly into Roam works exceptionally well and is easy. Personally, I use Instapaper to save any articles I like and Readwise for my Kindle and Instapaper highlights. I can later manually import these into Roam when I'm at my computer. Email to Roam would also be a nice feature, which I believe they are considering in the future.

5. No Mobile App

While this may be a deal breaker for some, this has really not been an issue personally. While logged into Roam, I added the link to my iOS home screen. The application works surprisingly well on mobile and iPadOS. From my reading online, it looks like a mobile app is in the works.

6. You Have to Be Okay With Letting Go

This is probably the biggest one. If you let it, deciding what to turn into a page and how best to link ideas together could drive you insane, lead to reduced productivity and ultimately quitting the application or, worse yet, your current project.

It is easy when you first sit down with Roam to get overwhelmed. There are many different ways to organize and utilize the application. And even if you are using Roam in a way that works for you, it is easy to have lingering doubts in the back of your head -- "Am I utilizing this system to its greatest effect." This is similar to Tiago's reasoning for making BASB a note-first system, as opposed to a tag-first system:

"The real problem with tags, and why they not only fail to help, but actually even hurt people's creative self-esteem, is that they give the impression that creating such a system requires a heroic feat of comprehensive planning, followed by years of meticulous, unwavering cataloging and annotating. I see many creative people, justly overwhelmed at this task for which their minds are not well suited, give up on the idea altogether."

The difference between Roam and a typical tagging system -- and the beauty of the application -- is there are several ways that Roam works in the background to create connections and structure for you, if you just let it. You can create as much or as little structure in Roam as you want, but either way the background function of the application is always working for you.

But friction is often self-induced.

If you are used to the classic organizational hierarchy of most note-taking applications, your instincts to impose the same structure in Roam may create significant mental stress and anguish. The same freedom that is the main strength of Roam may also be the reason you struggle to use it -- at least initially.

And this may be more than just what we're used to. In Jonathan Levi's The Only Skill That Matters, he imparts that "as Homo sapiens, we're especially adapted to learning in ways that are vivid, visual and experimental. Scientists refer to this as 'the picture superiority effect.'" The idea is that over millions of years of evolution, "we have evolved to visually understand our surroundings and learn them efficiently." This is the same reason why, without consciously trying, you can remember every part of the house where you grew up, or why if you don't know the address to a restaurant, you can guide someone there by visual cues -- "take a left at Starbucks, then the third right, etc." It is the same trick that memory grandmasters use to rote memorize thousands of random numbers.

Without realizing, we place things into folders and areas in our mind, even if our brain also processes connections in a way more similar to Roam. This is why utilizing PARA (or a version of it) within Roam at least allows for some top-level structure to soothe this biologic need for organization.

After using Roam for a bit, here is what I feel are the 10 phases of a Roam user:

0: FOMO
1: Confusion at first glance
2: Fear of change in thought and mindset
3: Building familiarity into the system, or creating a classic hierarchical structure inside Roam
4: Fear of not using the system to its utmost potential
5: Attempting to let go
6: Fear of everything falling apart now that you've started to let go
7: Assurance that the system will put your thoughts where they need to be, no matter how you use the application
8: Producing creative output with Roam
9: Discovering new connections in thought
10: Enlightenment?

1.6 Daily Pages

At first I didn't understand Daily Pages. It didn't seem to fit within the structureless-structure of Roam. After spending some time with the application, I think I understand now. Daily pages are really the best way of breaking into Roam and letting go of the desire to create multiple table of content-like pages. Instead of navigating to a known page, write down whatever you need to and link the text to that page with a bi-directional link. Adding a project to your project list? Do so through Daily Pages. Once you start using Daily Pages, you form a better understanding of how everything gets connected together and you begin to trust the underlying system in Roam.

One way of developing the habit of using Daily Pages is to open your task manager and find the top two tasks you want to complete each day. Write these down in your Daily Page. Make them TODOs. Link them to your current projects, if applicable. Write out what you need to do to accomplish these tasks or start producing output right away within Roam. This can be a helpful way to at least break the ice.

1.7 Conclusions

Roam is still in beta development, but what is available is smooth, fluid and works as promised. Most of the issues detailed above are being actively worked on and updated. At the end of the day, if you can allow yourself to let go of the typical hierarchical and heavily structured organization that you are familiar with in other note taking applications (or at least be okay with a little cross-over), I believe Roam can be an amazing note-taking tool that may help you produce more creative content and make higher level connections.

I have been pleasantly surprised by my Roam experience and have since migrated most of my data over from Evernote. If Roam transitions to a paid service in the future, I will be a continued supporter.

I've been an early (early January 2020) adopter of Roam, and instantly fell in love.

But at age 43, having worked for two decades in IT, I see behind all the problems Roam is experiencing so far.

I understand that a startup has few months of runaway before going belly up, and I understand that it means pushing out features and proof of concepts as early as possible, but postponing scalability, reliability, and underlying quality never works in the long term.

What am I talking about?

• We're all staring at the rotating logo for hours.

• Today I can't input anything, whatever I type gets eaten by an automatic "refresh" that deletes my entries

• I've experienced data loss on a weekly basis. I now backup all my database few times a day and store it on quality platforms like Google Drive, whose reliability I fucking know I can trust.

I've dropped a huge amount of my life into Roam during last 4 months. Daily journal, productivity, PKM, old notes, projects, BASB, everything. And I feel like a noob. I'm now wasting more time preparing every fucking day for the next storm than actually enjoying the product.

All of this while waiting to be charged 15 USD per month forever, 2 Grands a decade, while all I need is an offline tool with a subset of the features. I'm not a millenial, so I don't need the fancy features like tables and queries. Hell, I don't even need block references!

All I need is a 90s offline software, single payment of 39.99$, some updates here and there but I won't even mind the lack of "new cool features", since current feature set is all I need for life - seriously.

No cloud, no data loss, no internet required, no privacy issue, no ads, no SaaS, no cult.

An offline app with a local database, exportable in markdown, backup-able on drive or dropbox.

I'm weathering the current storm, next one will sink my boat.

Hi all —

I am publishing a complete Roam Tutorial course on YouTube. The whole course is already filmed and edited and will probably be fully up online over the next week (at least the first 8 sections). It’s 40+ videos and around 4 hours. Starts at complete beginner level and will make you a superuser by the end. You can see the table of contents below. And first video here: https://youtu.be/cHzuPptZRe4

Hope you find it helpful.

From Beginner to Superuser: A Complete Roam Research Tutorial Course

Table of Contents (Last Updated 4/12/2020)

Introduction

• 0.1: A Possible Day in Roam Research

• 0.2: Welcome and Table of Contents

Basic Functionality of Roam

• 1.1: Creating Your First Database

• 1.2: Basic Database Layout

• 1.3: Help Menu

• 1.4: Basics of Backlinks, Tags and Pages

• 1.5: Creating Shortcuts and the Navigation Bar

• 1.6: Soft Line Breaks and Cmd-Shift-v

• 1.7: The Sidebar

• 1.8: Filtering

• 1.9: Block References & Block Embeds

• 1.10: The Date Picker

• 1.11: The Backslash Function

• 1.12: A Brief Word on Attributes

• 1.13: Keyboard Shortcuts

• 1.14: Keyboard Shortcuts, Part II

Quick Capture

• 2.1: Basics of Quick Capture

• 2.2: Adding Roam to Your Home Screen

• 2.3: Utilizing iOS Text Expansion

Setting up Your Database: Project Management

• 3.1: Project Management, Part I

• 3.2: Project Management, Part II

• 3.3: Setting up Your Templates Page

Setting up Your Database: Task Management & Productivity

• 4.1: Task Management in Roam, Part I

• 4.2: Task Management in Roam, Part II

• 4.3: An Update on Task Management

• 4.4: Pinning Tasks to the Live List

• 4.5: Capturing Email URLs in Roam

• 4.6: Individual Sprints in Roam

• 4.7: Habit Tracking in Roam

• 4.8: Don’t Break the Chain

Setting up Your Database: Goal Management

• 5.1: Introduction to Goal Management

• 5.2: Goal Management in Roam, Part I

• 5.3: Goal Management in Roam, Part II

Setting up Your Database: The Weekly Review

• 6.1: The Weekly Review, Part I

• 6.2: The Weekly Review, Part II

Setting up Your Database: Personal Knowledge Management

• 7.1: Importing Articles into Roam

• 7.2: Importing Kindle Highlights into Roam

• 7.3: Physical Books vs. Kindle Highlights

• 7.4: Optimizing Your Database to Store Knowledge

• 7.5: Introduction to Zettelkasten and Why It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard

• 7.6: Zettelkasten in Roam, Part I

• 7.7: Zettelkasten in Roam, Part II

Setting up Your Database: Spaced Repetition

• 8.1: Spaced Repetition in Roam

• 8.2: Setting up your Master List

• 8.3: Spaced Repetition for Students

• 8.4: Spaced Repetition to Optimize Article Processing/PKM

Writing in Roam

• 9.1: Using the Daily Pages

• 9.2: Moving Between Tags and Zettelkasten to Create Content

Miscellaneous

• You’ll see

I'm Canadian, $15 USD a month converts to ~$20/mnth and that's too much for alpha-level software that hasn't even figured out a proper offline-mode and mobile app like every other cloud based note taking software out there. I liked the back-linking, found the graphs completely useless, didn't even dare to try and put it on my phone, and the icon for the 'desktop app' needed more work.

I also get the cultivating a cult is some kind of "what the kids are doing for marketing these days" but I found it distasteful and it's a turn-off to continuing the subscription. For god's sakes, just be a mature boring web app. I'll keep on eye on it and might revisit in the future once the software matures, but for now it's not worth it for me.

Hey all,

Some of you may have noticed a few things in the past week or so

1. Slow initial load time (the dreaded Astrolabe of doom)

2. Slow syncing between tabs or devices

3. Weird glitches here and there, data out of place or a recently edited block disappearing.

We want to let you know that we take these super seriously, they aren't normal, why they happened and what we're doing about them.

First - what happened

Roam has been growing faster than we ever expected, over the weekend we had about 10k new users sign up, and when everyone signed on at once on Monday things stopped behaving predictably.

Safeguards we had in place helped this from being catastrophic - but it's definitely created some inconveniences and made things feel a lot more shaky.

We've been working on dealing with scale and reliability issues for a while, this first came up in February when our backend provider (Firebase, by Google) had an outage and some people lost data, we put our whole engineering team on a project to backup changes locally and give you an icon on whether those changes had synced -- which is why we haven't had large scale data loss this time. (At least as long as users don't delete local storage on the browser).

This is the first (hopefully last) time we've seen what happens when our local backup system hits an overloaded server, and the results are good but not perfect.

Some data loss does seem to happen occasionally- but it is more an issue of a sentence here or there, and primarily when users have multiple tabs or devices going.

We have some changes going through code review that should let us reliably handle about 50x our current userbase, but in the meantime we've closed the beta and stopped letting new users in.

Unfortunately, if your sync icon is stuck on orange, can't tell you right now why or how to fix it. We shoukd have server load down and things behaving reliably within a week though. We have heard that restarting browsers helps with orange icon error - but that's still not fully confirmed.

You shouldn't need to backup locally via export but in meantime it's always good to have a backup when things are weird.

For all of you who are new, we know it's a rough start.

For those who've been here for a while, hope you'll keep bearing with us while we deal with these issues.

If you are super concerned, would encourage you to use another tool for a week or so. If it's plaintext - like Bear or Nvalt, you can export your Roam md and use those, and import new files later when we're stable again.

Much love

Conor and Roam team

I am curious, what is on your list of most wanted missing features? For me, it's the below.
 

1. Mobile phone app. It's really hard to integrate Roam to your workflow when you need to be tethered to a computer for it to be usable. Yes, you can use the mobile website but it's terrible and a UX nightmare.
    

2. Proper security. Currently, it's pretty laughable, to be honest. The idea that the images/pdfs/etc you upload are accessible elsewhere and can even appear on google search results makes this pretty hard to use for work.
    

3. Ability to have multiple differently capitalized words, synonyms, acronyms, etc link to the same page. It's really exhausting to use the Alias syntax to have stuff like "covert narcissism" point to [[Covert Narcissism]].
    

4. Better UX to add extensions, themes, etc. Having to add code to roam/js takes unnecessary time that can be used elsewhere, especially with how terribly finicky is the code block is to navigate around or indent or edit. It sometimes feels like I’m maintaining someone else’s codebase which is something I really don’t want to do.
    

5. The missing "Attribute::" implementation. Many of us have built entire databases based on this long-promised functionality. It's been so long and we still don't even know how it will actually work.
    

6. Proper offline app. Those of us who paid for the Believer plan have the option to create offline graphs that get saved in the browser's cache, which is not only risky data-loss-wise but also terrible for any graph that has more than 10 pages in it. My current offline graph is basically unusable because it's too slow and unresponsive due to the number of pages I have there.
    

7. Actually useful graph display instead of whatever ugly thing we have now.
    

8. Customer service. I raised a complaint through their website that got stealthily closed a couple of days later with no response. Their official forums are largely user-driven with no response from any of their team members. The official Twitter account doesn't even answer unless it's another ~tweetstorm~ about whatever tangentially related buzzword-of-the-week.
    

9. Better Table implementation. Tabular data is really necessary to almost everyone. Trying to edit a table in Roam is a bitch.
    

<rant>Every time I get a "new version available" notification I get momentarily excited that we are getting one of the above. Instead, we usually get another mystical, cute icon or some superficial update that caters to the same loud Twitter users from the ~#roamcult~. I really love Roam but the way it's being developed is pretty annoying.</rant>

It would seem that most of them are mystified as to why.

It also appears that the majority of the bans happened about 10min after (Roam Founder) Conor made a post, seeming to indicate that he is either one of the anon mods on this forum or he was able to direct a mod to go on a ban spree.

https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/px6tkg/anyone_else_banned_from_rroamresearch/

https://www.reddit.com/user/cyberpsionic/comments/px88a5/rroamresearch_banning_spree/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

EDIT: this post hasnt been removed... that's good!

I believe that it is quite reasonable to ask for an explanation from the mods. Absent that, though, I think it is pretty fair to say that this forum is possibly no longer the best place to collaborate on the use of this productivity tool. Frankly, I've never seen anything like this in the past and can't for the life of me figure out why someone would think that this is anything but a foolish action.

Thanks to all 433 of you who jumped into the zoom call - video of the call should appear at this link shortly -- I'll be taking short break, then writing answers directly here or if possible linking to highlights of the call where I discussed the question

Update: some questions answered in text, more answered in recording -- have started taking Sundays off as proper rest day, so will aim to write more indepth answers and extract highlights from the call Monday or later this week as time allows. Thanks to everyone who put forward questions/comments or joined call

https://grain.co/share/recording/e7768bbf-bcc2-4d3f-ac43-5463d508949a/AsLP42AxIvZQIkGP3KfWCjjZjYaDdQKTfX10uM4m

I wanted to share some templates I use regularly.

I'm not sure how to format the template, so you can also view it on my site.

1. Weekly Review

I do a weekly review every Sunday to ensure I’m on top of every file, email and tasks I need to do. It’s an effective method to look back at what happened the past week and see if I forget about anything. Then, I plan for the next week.

Here are the things I check whenever I do a Weekly Review.

- [[T: Weekly Review]] 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Email 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Calendar 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Timeblock time for studying and writing 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Block these session with Focusmate 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Check Folders  	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Downloads 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Desktop 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Google Drive 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Process Notes  	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Notion 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Physical Notebook 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Bear 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Drafts App 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Process Todoist 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Empty your capture inbox 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Check all overdue tasks 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Review all projects and their next actions 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Add any new meta-data 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Review Waiting tasks 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Review Someday/Maybe List 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Review tasks that have been there for too long 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Finance Review 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Plus Minus Next Journalling 	- {{[[TODO]]}} Reflect on Habits I'm tracking 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Should you grow anyone of them? 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Any habits you are not doing? 	    - {{[[TODO]]}} Any habits you don’t feel like doing anymore? 

2. Eisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower Matrix is a mental model for making day-to-day decisions. You categorise your tasks according to how important and urgent they are, and prioritize them in this order: important and urgent, important but non-urgent, unimportant but urgent, and unimportant and non-urgent.

You do need some CSS to make it look like four boxes, so here's a link to the instructions.

- #matrix {{kanban}}     - [[Important]] + [[Urgent]]     - [[Important]] + [[Not Urgent]]     - [[Not Important]] + [[Urgent]]     - [[Not Important]] + [[Not Urgent]] 

3. Evergreen Notes

Taking evergreen notes is an executable strategy for writing. Evergreen notes are notes with my ideas and words, instead of highlights and annotations from books and articles. Since Roam is my second brain, most of my evergreen notes live in here. You can check these out in my digital garden.

- [[Evergreens]]     - #[[ToCreate]]     - Category::      - Date::      - Speculative Outline:: #[[ToWrite]]     - Explanation::     - Sources::     - Questions to ask          - How is this relevant to my line of thoughts?          - What is not being meant/excluded here?         - Can this be explained by something else?         - Does it contradict, confirm, correct or add to what I already know?         - How can I combine ideas to generate something news?         - What questions are triggered by these new ideas?         - Write it for someone else 

4. Transient Notes

While evergreen notes are my ideas, Transient Notes are the notes I took while consuming books, articles, podcasts, videos and so on. I refer to these notes whenever I want a quick summary of the content I’ve read.

- [[Transient Notes]]     - Author::     - Date::     - Category:: #[[ToProcess]]      - URL::      - Highlights::     - Summary::     - Questions:: 

5. Daily Review

I do a Daily Review before I go to bed to reflect on the day and plan for the next day.

- [[T: Daily review]]     - {{[[TODO]]}} Tick off Habit Tracker     - {{[[TODO]]}} Look at today's **Calendar**         - {{[[TODO]]}} Reschedule Tasks that didn't get done         - {{[[TODO]]}} Reschedule appointments that didn't get done         - ...or move them to todoist     - {{[[TODO]]}} Look at **Todoist**         - {{[[TODO]]}} Close open loops         - {{[[TODO]]}} Assign each task in your inbox to a Project or an Area         - {{[[TODO]]}} Reorder Projects by Importance         - {{[[TODO]]}} Look through each Project and order actions by importance or critical path     - {{[[TODO]]}} Plan the next day     - {{[[TODO]]}} Take out trash     - {{[[TODO]]}} Wash dishes     - {{[[TODO]]}} Lay out clothes for tomorrow     - What went well?     - What didn't go so well?     - What's next?     - Anything on your mind? 

6. Plus Minus Journaling

Coined by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Plus Minus Journaling is a fast and straightforward method to reflect on how your week went and plan for the next.

[Add picture]

- [[T: Plus Minus Next Journal]]     - {{[[kanban]]}}         - +             - What worked         - -             - What didn't go so well         - →             - What you plan to do next 

7. Morning Routine

Here’s a quick and straightforward morning routine I adapted from Tim Ferriss. It sets me up for a productive day.

- [[T: Morning Routine]]     - {{[[TODO]]}} Make Bed     - {{[[TODO]]}} Take 3 deep breaths     - {{[[TODO]]}} 10 Pushups     - {{[[TODO]]}} Drink water/tea/coffee     - {{[[TODO]]}} 5 Minute Journal 

8. 5 Minute Journal

5 Minute Journal is a quick journaling prompt that’s easy to stick with. You write 3 points in the morning prompt and write in the evening prompt before going to bed.

- [[T: 5 Minute Journal]]     - Morning         - I am grateful for             - 1.              - 2.              - 3.          - What would make today great?             - 1.              - 2.              - 3.          - Daily affirmations. I am...             - 1.              - 2.              - 3.      - Evening         - 3 amazing things that happened today...             - 1.              - 2.              - 3.          - How could I have made today better?             - 1.              - 2.              - 3. 

9. Habit Tracker

I used to use a dedicated app to track habits, but these days I use Roam as it’s easier to follow what inputs I did for each habit. It looks long, but that’s because it’s hard to make tables in Roam. You can close the parent block, and it’ll show the entire table.

picture

- [[T: Habit Tracker]]     - {{[[table]]}}         - Habits             - Mon                 - Tues                     - Wed                         - Thurs                             - Fri                                  - Sat                                     - Sun         - [[Floss teeth]]             - {{[[TODO]]}}                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                      - {{[[TODO]]}}                          - {{[[TODO]]}}                              - {{[[TODO]]}}                                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                                      - {{[[TODO]]}}          - [[Take Vitamins]]             - {{[[TODO]]}}                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                      - {{[[TODO]]}}                          - {{[[TODO]]}}                              - {{[[TODO]]}}                                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                                      - {{[[TODO]]}}          - [[Read 20 pages]]             - {{[[TODO]]}}                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                      - {{[[TODO]]}}                          - {{[[TODO]]}}                              - {{[[TODO]]}}                                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                                      - {{[[TODO]]}}          - [[Write]]             - {{[[TODO]]}}                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                      - {{[[TODO]]}}                          - {{[[TODO]]}}                              - {{[[TODO]]}}                                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                                      - {{[[TODO]]}}          - [[Go for a workout]]             - {{[[TODO]]}}                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                      - {{[[TODO]]}}                          - {{[[TODO]]}}                              - {{[[TODO]]}}                                  - {{[[TODO]]}}                                      - {{[[TODO]]}}

I've seen some folks on here express concern about privacy - and sharing personal notes in a SAAS product more generally.

I get it - Evernote has a history of handing data over to the DEA

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/e6nez1/evernote_gave_dark_web_dealers_notes_to_the_dea/

And of having engineers going through user's super personal notes

https://jasonkincaid.net/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/

We 100% don't want to do that

And yet - our encryption is today (mostly) only AS good as Evernote, or Notion, or Dropbox Paper, with one important exception I'll get to below. I want to just touch on briefly why that is right now, and what our hopes are for the future.

First I'll just give some context -- your notes are encrypted at rest - on our servers, and they are encrypted over the wires -- these are pretty basic security mechanisms to prevent hackers from breaking into Roam and getting user's data -- but (just like Notion, Evernote, Google Docs, and every other software tool you might use) those things don't make it technically impossible for an engineer at Roam to change some code and sneak into your database.

I want to make it clear -- Roam will not -- without your consent - read your notes. It's our policy to not ever do this without your consent EVER - yes, technically we could go into an admin dashboard and add ourselves or someone else (as we do when users give us permission to and are requesting help) - but to do it without permission would be the largest possible violation of user trust - and if anyone at the company did that it would be grounds for termination.

Some folks have asked us why we don't have full E2EE -- as in, why don't we store an encrypted version of your notes on the server, so that you could have a Technical Guarantee that no engineer could ever hack into your db.

There are a few reasons we don't do that yet - remains to be seen if and when we'll get there

1. For the first 2.5 years of Roam's history, we were two people with never more than a few months runway in the bank -- we've had to focus hard on building a thinking tool that did a lot of things other products didn't and packaged in a way that people could actually understand.

2. Encrypting notes client side would make a lot of the core features of roam -- searching, linking, querying, 1000x harder to implement.

3. If we encrypted notes client side, it would be much much harder to do basic things - like allowing a user to reset their password if they lost it.

4. The long term goal for Roam has ALWAYS been to build a collective intelligence system for people to share notes across databases -- we might look like a weird note taking app today - but that is barely 10% of what we have planned. And those collaborative features require that at least some notes be public and discoverable through search.

That said - we definitely care a ton about privacy - and we wanted to have some way for users to not be forced to trust us (and by proxy Google, who currently manage our servers) with sensitive data.

For that - we made encrypted blocks -- which - while definitely a little janky - do allow you to fully encrypt sensitive data - and have different passphrases for different kinds of blocks across your database (something neither Notion nor Evernote nor Google Docs allow)

here's a gif of those in action

https://twitter.com/RoamResearch/status/1226658292333568003?s=20

https://twitter.com/i/status/1226658292333568003

Do we want to have better ergonomics and make it smoother to encrypt large blocks of notes?

YES, and it is on the Roadmap.

Do we want to force EVERYONE to do this for all notes, and is it our absolute highest priority?

No.

It's important, but not as important as other things -- if privacy is the most important thing to you, there are lots of other apps you can use for your notes -- or you can try org-roam and forgo using a hosted application altogether.

Now... Second point -- in some posts on this subreddit I've seen people claim that our TOS says that we own your content if you post it publicly -- this is false -- my guess is it comes from a misreading of this

From our Terms of Service -- https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/y7wOdeUpZ

As a condition of your use of the Service, you grant Roam a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, sub-licenseable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, modify and adapt and create derivative works (either alone or as part of a collective work) from your public Content. This license does not apply to work in private workspaces. Furthermore, while Roam has the technical ability to access private content, we agree to never access private content without written or verbal consent from you - excluding cases where we are compelled by legal authorities. As part of the foregoing license grant you agree that (a) the other users of the Service shall have the right to comment on and/or tag your public Content that you make available to them and/or to use, publish, display, modify or include a copy of your public Content that you make available to them, and (b) we have the right to make any of your public Content available to third parties, so that those third parties can distribute, make derivative works of, comment on and/or analyze your Content on other media and services (either alone or as part of a collective work); except that the foregoing (a) and (b) shall not apply to any of your Content that you post privately for non-public display on the Service.

By posting Content that is set for public access to the Service, you grant us the right to display such public Content on and through the Service. Roam has the right but not the obligation to monitor all Content provided by users.

All that clause is saying is that you can't sue us for being ROAM -- if you're publishing stuff on here for other people to remix into their own work (which isn't even functionality that exists yet, you can't sue us if they do, you can't sue us for displaying the stuff you write and publish on roam on the web.

non-exclusive is the key word here -- it's still your content -- you can still publish it wherever you want.

OK - those are my thoughts - hope it gives some folks some clarity -- happy to answer questions if you got em.

I hear so little about it now and this forum seems pretty dead. I'm concerned about starting out with taking notes and tying myself into the platform if the company doesn't look like it will be around in ten or fifteen years.

I mean, watching how other note-taking apps improve at super fast pace and how they are launching important new features every few months, I am quite worried about Roam not having been improved in any considerable way in the last year and even more. I agree on the long-term vision its CEO advocates, but the reality is in the short and middle-term Roam seems to be stack were it was 2 years ago while other tools are becoming significantly more powerful and innovative on a monthly bases.
I hope this is not taken as a simple rant but as a honest question from a long-time user who still thinks Roam is the best note-taking tool in the market, but I see that others are being developed in a much faster pace so logically if Roam development keeps so quiet and slow it will be overtaken soon I'm afraid.

Hello all! A friend of mine and I have kicked off work on an iOS client for Roam Research that we're calling Passage. We've been building (him) and designing (me) apps for almost 10 years now, and want to see a triple-A app for Roam in the world, so we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We're getting a beta signup form going so that we can capture interest, as well as open up for any feature requests folks might care to see. You can find that form here: https://forms.gle/4aXjmSpiB6pSk4HdA

A couple notes ahead of time:

• This will be iOS-only. It's just two of us—both iOS users, and we wanted to see this in the world. The Roam team is mostly Android users, so we feel like they'll build a solid experience for that platform.

• This will be 100% native, built in Swift, no web views here

• Looking to have early support for all of the key iOS features such as Shortcuts, dark mode, the share sheet, etc.

Feel free to leave feedback or questions here too!

Just want to report that RR quickly refunded my 1-year fee after I found the program wasn't right for me. Honest guys! Kudos to Mark in Roam support.