Getting Comfortable With Roam (Coleman McCormick)

Coleman McCormick on RoamBrain: Roam destroys the top-down hierarchy of note-taking tools.

Why it was kept

The excerpts: most note apps are modal and hierarchical; Roam removes the need to decide where something goes; Roam as ‘a CRM for ideas — Idea Relationship Management’; information falls out of your head and organises itself. Kyle hung a Ryan Hoover tweet on personal CRMs off the same capture.

As Kyle captured it

• Read Getting Comfortable With Roam by Coleman McCormick- Roam Research RoamBrain
  • Most applications for notes are both modal and hierarchical. When working on a text document, it lives in a folder with other related files. A half page of notes from a meeting has a specific place it should go. But because you don’t always want to deal with filing things logically, it’s easy to end up with thoughts and ideas out of place, caught up and buried in meeting notes because that’s what you had open when a thought popped into your head (or even worse, with arbitrary quick captured scratch docs you open once and are promptly disconnected from everything).
  • Roam solves this problem by destroying the top-down hierarchy of knowledge management tools. Instead of worrying about where to put a new document (Roam calls them “pages”), you just make a new one anywhere. All pages are peers. It’s like a wiki in that way, but it feels more fluid, more natural and less mechanical.
  • I described it to someone through analogy to a CRM. Roam is a CRM for ideas: call it “Idea Relationship Management.” Since I’ve been using it as a sort of productivity journal (Tiago Forte calls this the “second brain“), I’ve been living in it the whole work day.** It’s like an operating system for managing information — always on, always absorbing new data. And, like a real brain, linked reference synapses form between the information neurons**.
  • Information falls out of your head and into your Roam database spontaneously organizing itself, expanding organically. After heavy use for a few weeks, navigating through the database feels like descending into your own Wikipedia rabbit hole — like swimming through your previous thoughts.
  • https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/820335434018353152?s=20 - Personal CRM