8 ms·

I like the author’s enthusiasm for organizing personal information. That was me from about 15 years ago to about 3 years ago. I stopped spending time and effor

I like the author’s enthusiasm for organizing personal information. That was me from about 15 years ago to about 3 years ago. I stopped spending time and effort when I realized how little I used my organized notes. Specifically, I used Evernote and had my personal information wonderfully organized, but rarely used it. Now I use something simpler: For work: about 20 Emacs org-mode files for various topics. I use grep to find stuff. For personal: at different times I have used Apple Notes or Google Keep to maintain todo lists, shopping lists, notes on present and future writing projects, planning travel, etc. Both support search. I spend very little time writing these notes and they are useful. A few times a year, I spend a few minutes deleting notes I don’t need anymore. Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me. The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it.

vorpalhex 7y ago
I use my notes for big ideas that serve as fodder. So, I don't really keep notes on like "Here is how to do X in Javascript well" but instead "here are a collection of clippings on interesting LED art pieces and a link to my parts inventory".
dustingetz 7y ago
the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can get a 10x improvement here that would translate to getting the same amount of work done with 10x fewer people which is a whole layer of middle management just gone. Or alternatively you can continue to barely keep it together at 10x greater scale.
- The_Colonel 7y ago
  > the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    Confluence is light years away from the potential of this kind of tool I think, well over 10x. And there's a superlinear payoff with really good tools, because of network effects both in amount of users and the quality/quantity/timeliness of information that good tools attract.
    - The_Colonel 7y ago
      I work with large knowledge bases daily and the choke points just aren't in the tools - it's the humans. People generally suck at writing - they often have very incomplete/skewed information, write only from their own perspective and are not that heavily invested in having great knowledge base (as opposed to solving their own immediate problem). True domain experts who understand things typically don't have the time (and/or skill) to write good documents. Documents don't get updated or in better case there's a series of "patch" documents describing the changes but not the complete future state. I don't see how these major issues can be fixed by technology. This could be largely mitigated by organizational changes - hiring dedicated technical writers / "knowledge managers", but that's just a cost center for companies so it essentially never happens.
      - fulafel 7y ago
        I suspect there are a lot of different user bases and we're not thinking about the same one. There are existing organisations and institutions where people want to find tools like these and are excited about the prospect, for example expert organisations where cooperation and single shraed information base in a project is very valuable and the users are good at writing & collaboration, used to real-time tools with fine grained tight knit collaboration like Google Docs / Slack. Techology can grease the wheels and provide multipliers for motivated users, sometimes very large multipliers, but of course not every person is suited for it.
soapboxrocket 7y ago
> Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me. I had an employee that worked for me that used to save everything! I came from an airframe manufacture in my past that automatically deleted emails more than 30 days old and twice a year had a cleaning day to destroy any prints or notes in/around our desk that hadn't been used in the last 6 months (this was all for lawsuit reasons to reduce discovery). So I had him explain why he kept everything and spent so much time organizing it. His primary reason was that if a customer every came back and claimed they wanted something different from the original request that we could prove them wrong. I simply asked him, "and if you can prove them wrong will that change their mind, or just piss them off that you went out of your way to prove them wrong?" He tried to argue about costs and requirements, and I reminded him that if anything was a contractual obligation then it needed to be captured in a requirements document and a change request put in to make a change; if on the other hand it was more of an informal request for support or information, if they change their mind just roll with it no need to prove they already asked for it.
Multiplayer 7y ago
Roam appears to remove the time and effort needed to organize notes. Just write. Links will happen. No need for silos, no need for hierarchies. They are removing the friction and effort. This has huge implications and potential. I am with you on not going and looking for notes (I don't often browse through my photo library either, which is a close analog). This really feels like it's onto something special if you can let go of the evernote paradigm.
- nzeribe 7y ago
  Yah, but Eastgate's Tinderbox has been doing this for damned-near 20 years, no? https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox8.html https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox8.html
SamBam 7y ago
This is exactly me with Evernote, and my same thoughts reading this. I wish Evernote had some sort of stats on notes: I'm sure I would find that 90% of my notes have never been opened. Some of them (e.g. warranty numbers, etc) are there just in case they're needed, but the majority will never be opened. I probably use the same 2% of my notes (< 30 notes) 90% of the time. (Lots of invented stats here, yes.) The article describes an incredibly easy content-creation system, but one where you can easy create much more content than is useful. (It reminds me of the ease of taking hundreds of photos a day with smart phones, particularly if you're a new parent.) Even when you want to find the information, I think this lack of structure makes it hard to do so. For example, the author has a note that looks like this: * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]] * [[Dogajolo Tuscano]] from [[Tuscany]] My understanding (from looking at the other examples) is that if he went to the [[Red Wine]] page (presumably to look up a nice wine to buy), he'd see December 3rd, 2019 * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]] Some other date * Bought a [[Red Wine]] for [[so-and-so]]: Yet another random note about other stuff: * Buy some [[Red Wine]] for [[whats-his-name]] Even the links that point to useful information don't have the information right there -- you have to click through for each link. And some of the references may not have anything to do with a good wine recommendation at all. So you have to edit the [[Red Wine]] page to make it a useful list, but that's what we do with Evernote already, and the linking part wasn't that useful.
- nateliason 7y ago
  Not necessarily, you can filter the backlinks to [[Red Wine]] from within the Red Wine page to only include other tags, like Super Tuscan.
- pps 7y ago
  You can shift-click them to open them in sidebar (where you can edit them the same way as in main view). You can open unlimited number of pages/blocks in the sidebar. And if you find that they're not useful for you anymore then you can simply remove or unlink them. Without ever leaving Red Wine page. It's funny how almost everybody here tries to compare it to other things. Yes, you can do everything even on paper! Zettelkasten was done first on paper, GTD was done first on paper. But this is new kind of software, which promotes new workflows and ideas about using your thoughts and data, and if you want to compare it to existing solutions then you should compare it to TheBrain or ConnectedText. It's not your typical markdown editor / outliner with some new features - you can start using it like that, but you will change your workflow after few hours or days in ways that you can't simply imagine right now :) I hope we will have more software with such flexibility in the future, competition is always good, I might even reimplement this myself as my private hobby project, because it's so useful and I can't imagine going back to normal note editors if something happens to Roam dev.
The_Colonel 7y ago
For me the notes app is almost like a workspace - I need to figure something out, I write it down, start to break it down, describe, analyse - this process helps me to understand the problem. The fact that the artifacts of this process will not disappear is a nice bonus. A lot of the time I don't ever read them again, but I got the main benefit (understanding) already anyway. It's a bit similar to writing a journal - just the act of writing it down has big therapeutic and introspective effects. For me, the act of organizing the information actually does not take too much time but that might be caused by the fact that I typically don't obsess over correct categorization or do this "refactoring" when I'm bored. Main tool to find notes of interest is search anyway, categorization for me serves as a way to find related notes. > The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it. Lol, sounds like me, except it's been almost 3 years since I started (https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium if anybody's interested)
- conaws 7y ago
  Just as FYI - Roam is built in Clojure/Clojurescript and we're hiring
  - kian 7y ago
    Is there a link to your hiring page? I'm not seeing one on roamresearch.com
    - conaws 7y ago
      No hiring page yet, just dm @conaw on twitter for now
smoyer 7y ago
I've got almost 30 years of notes ... those notes have proven prior art for patents I didn't believe in and establish the date of invention for work I've created. There are good reasons for scientists and engineers to keep a notebook but the traditional paper version isn't nearly so searchable as something like the author is describing. P.S. Sometimes it's funny to see a grocery list from 15 years ago and see how my tastes have/haven't changed.
avocade 7y ago
Yep, can resonate a lot with that myself. I fell in love with GTD 20y ago and spent years trying to work out the best solution for _organizing_ thought, rather than putting all that energy into actually acting on thought. It was my hoarding & librarian lizard nerd brain gone into overdrive. It’s similar I think to what I did back in those same days when I switched briefly from Mac to PC (from the pain of MacOS 9 during the super early days of OS X), and spent so much time building my own PCs & installing configuring tearing my hear out re: CD-drivers et al plus just getting to a workable state over and over with Gentoo Linux or whatever flavor du jour — I did stuff FOR the computer instead of actually doing valuable stuff WITH/ON it. Nowadays I use mostly Apple Notes for pretty much everything (even though the backup story still sucks). But I’ve always been a huge fan of ”outliners”, it seems that it’s the closest to how my mind works. Still use OmniFocus for some personal task management (and OmniOutliner before that), and have used Dave Winer’s very nice little outliner web app off and on for years, just to jot down complex thoughts quickly. But Roam is definitely the thing I’m most excited about currently in this space. I find Notion.so and the others much too complex for most my needs (even though the inline database is a wicked cool idea!). And the fact that Roam is a small ClojureScript shop as well is just... PERFECT :)

vorpalhex 7y ago

I use my notes for big ideas that serve as fodder. So, I don't really keep notes on like "Here is how to do X in Javascript well" but instead "here are a collection of clippings on interesting LED art pieces and a link to my parts inventory".

dustingetz 7y ago

the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can get a 10x improvement here that would translate to getting the same amount of work done with 10x fewer people which is a whole layer of middle management just gone. Or alternatively you can continue to barely keep it together at 10x greater scale.

The_Colonel 7y ago
> the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.
- fulafel 7y ago
  Confluence is light years away from the potential of this kind of tool I think, well over 10x. And there's a superlinear payoff with really good tools, because of network effects both in amount of users and the quality/quantity/timeliness of information that good tools attract.
  - The_Colonel 7y ago
    I work with large knowledge bases daily and the choke points just aren't in the tools - it's the humans. People generally suck at writing - they often have very incomplete/skewed information, write only from their own perspective and are not that heavily invested in having great knowledge base (as opposed to solving their own immediate problem). True domain experts who understand things typically don't have the time (and/or skill) to write good documents. Documents don't get updated or in better case there's a series of "patch" documents describing the changes but not the complete future state. I don't see how these major issues can be fixed by technology. This could be largely mitigated by organizational changes - hiring dedicated technical writers / "knowledge managers", but that's just a cost center for companies so it essentially never happens.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      I suspect there are a lot of different user bases and we're not thinking about the same one. There are existing organisations and institutions where people want to find tools like these and are excited about the prospect, for example expert organisations where cooperation and single shraed information base in a project is very valuable and the users are good at writing & collaboration, used to real-time tools with fine grained tight knit collaboration like Google Docs / Slack. Techology can grease the wheels and provide multipliers for motivated users, sometimes very large multipliers, but of course not every person is suited for it.

soapboxrocket 7y ago

> Anyway, thinking about cost/benefits, not spending much time organizing my own information makes sense to me. I had an employee that worked for me that used to save everything! I came from an airframe manufacture in my past that automatically deleted emails more than 30 days old and twice a year had a cleaning day to destroy any prints or notes in/around our desk that hadn't been used in the last 6 months (this was all for lawsuit reasons to reduce discovery). So I had him explain why he kept everything and spent so much time organizing it. His primary reason was that if a customer every came back and claimed they wanted something different from the original request that we could prove them wrong. I simply asked him, "and if you can prove them wrong will that change their mind, or just piss them off that you went out of your way to prove them wrong?" He tried to argue about costs and requirements, and I reminded him that if anything was a contractual obligation then it needed to be captured in a requirements document and a change request put in to make a change; if on the other hand it was more of an informal request for support or information, if they change their mind just roll with it no need to prove they already asked for it.

Multiplayer 7y ago

Roam appears to remove the time and effort needed to organize notes. Just write. Links will happen. No need for silos, no need for hierarchies. They are removing the friction and effort. This has huge implications and potential. I am with you on not going and looking for notes (I don't often browse through my photo library either, which is a close analog). This really feels like it's onto something special if you can let go of the evernote paradigm.

nzeribe 7y ago
Yah, but Eastgate's Tinderbox has been doing this for damned-near 20 years, no? https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox8.html https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/updates/Tinderbox8.html

SamBam 7y ago

This is exactly me with Evernote, and my same thoughts reading this. I wish Evernote had some sort of stats on notes: I'm sure I would find that 90% of my notes have never been opened. Some of them (e.g. warranty numbers, etc) are there just in case they're needed, but the majority will never be opened. I probably use the same 2% of my notes (< 30 notes) 90% of the time. (Lots of invented stats here, yes.) The article describes an incredibly easy content-creation system, but one where you can easy create much more content than is useful. (It reminds me of the ease of taking hundreds of photos a day with smart phones, particularly if you're a new parent.) Even when you want to find the information, I think this lack of structure makes it hard to do so. For example, the author has a note that looks like this: * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]] * [[Dogajolo Tuscano]] from [[Tuscany]] My understanding (from looking at the other examples) is that if he went to the [[Red Wine]] page (presumably to look up a nice wine to buy), he'd see December 3rd, 2019 * Had a really good [[Super Tuscan]] [[Red Wine]] Some other date * Bought a [[Red Wine]] for [[so-and-so]]: Yet another random note about other stuff: * Buy some [[Red Wine]] for [[whats-his-name]] Even the links that point to useful information don't have the information right there -- you have to click through for each link. And some of the references may not have anything to do with a good wine recommendation at all. So you have to edit the [[Red Wine]] page to make it a useful list, but that's what we do with Evernote already, and the linking part wasn't that useful.

nateliason 7y ago
Not necessarily, you can filter the backlinks to [[Red Wine]] from within the Red Wine page to only include other tags, like Super Tuscan.
pps 7y ago
You can shift-click them to open them in sidebar (where you can edit them the same way as in main view). You can open unlimited number of pages/blocks in the sidebar. And if you find that they're not useful for you anymore then you can simply remove or unlink them. Without ever leaving Red Wine page. It's funny how almost everybody here tries to compare it to other things. Yes, you can do everything even on paper! Zettelkasten was done first on paper, GTD was done first on paper. But this is new kind of software, which promotes new workflows and ideas about using your thoughts and data, and if you want to compare it to existing solutions then you should compare it to TheBrain or ConnectedText. It's not your typical markdown editor / outliner with some new features - you can start using it like that, but you will change your workflow after few hours or days in ways that you can't simply imagine right now :) I hope we will have more software with such flexibility in the future, competition is always good, I might even reimplement this myself as my private hobby project, because it's so useful and I can't imagine going back to normal note editors if something happens to Roam dev.

The_Colonel 7y ago

For me the notes app is almost like a workspace - I need to figure something out, I write it down, start to break it down, describe, analyse - this process helps me to understand the problem. The fact that the artifacts of this process will not disappear is a nice bonus. A lot of the time I don't ever read them again, but I got the main benefit (understanding) already anyway. It's a bit similar to writing a journal - just the act of writing it down has big therapeutic and introspective effects. For me, the act of organizing the information actually does not take too much time but that might be caused by the fact that I typically don't obsess over correct categorization or do this "refactoring" when I'm bored. Main tool to find notes of interest is search anyway, categorization for me serves as a way to find related notes. > The turning point was spending months of part time hacking writing my own Evernote’s clone in Clojure in the backend, a Firefox plugin, and a web app. It was a fun project, but mire fun writing it than using it. Lol, sounds like me, except it's been almost 3 years since I started (https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium if anybody's interested)

conaws 7y ago
Just as FYI - Roam is built in Clojure/Clojurescript and we're hiring
- kian 7y ago
  Is there a link to your hiring page? I'm not seeing one on roamresearch.com
  - conaws 7y ago
    No hiring page yet, just dm @conaw on twitter for now

smoyer 7y ago

I've got almost 30 years of notes ... those notes have proven prior art for patents I didn't believe in and establish the date of invention for work I've created. There are good reasons for scientists and engineers to keep a notebook but the traditional paper version isn't nearly so searchable as something like the author is describing. P.S. Sometimes it's funny to see a grocery list from 15 years ago and see how my tastes have/haven't changed.

avocade 7y ago

Yep, can resonate a lot with that myself. I fell in love with GTD 20y ago and spent years trying to work out the best solution for _organizing_ thought, rather than putting all that energy into actually acting on thought. It was my hoarding & librarian lizard nerd brain gone into overdrive. It’s similar I think to what I did back in those same days when I switched briefly from Mac to PC (from the pain of MacOS 9 during the super early days of OS X), and spent so much time building my own PCs & installing configuring tearing my hear out re: CD-drivers et al plus just getting to a workable state over and over with Gentoo Linux or whatever flavor du jour — I did stuff FOR the computer instead of actually doing valuable stuff WITH/ON it. Nowadays I use mostly Apple Notes for pretty much everything (even though the backup story still sucks). But I’ve always been a huge fan of ”outliners”, it seems that it’s the closest to how my mind works. Still use OmniFocus for some personal task management (and OmniOutliner before that), and have used Dave Winer’s very nice little outliner web app off and on for years, just to jot down complex thoughts quickly. But Roam is definitely the thing I’m most excited about currently in this space. I find Notion.so and the others much too complex for most my needs (even though the inline database is a wicked cool idea!). And the fact that Roam is a small ClojureScript shop as well is just... PERFECT :)