4 ms·

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 note

by 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.
- SamBam 7y ago
  Perhaps this is all true. My main point, which was lost in my example of [[Red Wine]], was more about it being too easy to create new pages. In Evernote, I've tried to get away from creating notes on every random new thought, and started towards maintaining more useful large notes -- a list of books I want to read, instead of 50 pages that mention a book all tagged with "#books-to-read", for example. To me, this seems like moving back the other way -- it encourages you to create those 50 pages, because they all can be "linked" to each other. I guess I'd have to try it to know, but I feel like, for me personally, information would be lost.
  - pps 7y ago
    It will not be lost. Don't only give it a try, but force it to work for you and it will. I changed my process of writing in Roam multiple times, each time it was more optimised for me and weirder to explain for other people. I have GTD system that finally, after years of trying in every other existing software, works exactly like I want. It looks way different than any example of "GTD in Roam" I found so far - those examples could be reimplemented in Dynalist/Workflowy/other outliners - mine can't, it requires these mentions on the bottom and editable block references from other pages in my main dashboard page. But I didn't design it, it created itself. Explore and you will find your own ways. If you like simple lists then create simple lists without any links, that's perfectly fine, you can always change things later. I'm personally doing way less linking than author of that blog post, I don't feel like I'm forced. You can do there much more than that blog post describe and Roam docs also sucks in explaining what else than writing you can do so it might be a good idea to look for videos in Youtube, Roam dev created some demos and was also interviewed with demo presentations.
    - conaws 7y ago
      One of the devs here - totally true, our help docs and landing page don't really show half of what you can do. Help docs have a lot if you dig around though. Heres a link https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN Really appreciate users like pps who do the work of figuring out how to make Roam work for them at this early stage.
petra 7y ago
That data feels closer to prolog, than to text articles. Since search was the biggest problem with evernote, i'm curious what machine learning could do with the data in roam.
- conaws 7y ago
  Datalog :)

by SamBam 7y ago

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.

SamBam 7y ago
Perhaps this is all true. My main point, which was lost in my example of [[Red Wine]], was more about it being too easy to create new pages. In Evernote, I've tried to get away from creating notes on every random new thought, and started towards maintaining more useful large notes -- a list of books I want to read, instead of 50 pages that mention a book all tagged with "#books-to-read", for example. To me, this seems like moving back the other way -- it encourages you to create those 50 pages, because they all can be "linked" to each other. I guess I'd have to try it to know, but I feel like, for me personally, information would be lost.
- pps 7y ago
  It will not be lost. Don't only give it a try, but force it to work for you and it will. I changed my process of writing in Roam multiple times, each time it was more optimised for me and weirder to explain for other people. I have GTD system that finally, after years of trying in every other existing software, works exactly like I want. It looks way different than any example of "GTD in Roam" I found so far - those examples could be reimplemented in Dynalist/Workflowy/other outliners - mine can't, it requires these mentions on the bottom and editable block references from other pages in my main dashboard page. But I didn't design it, it created itself. Explore and you will find your own ways. If you like simple lists then create simple lists without any links, that's perfectly fine, you can always change things later. I'm personally doing way less linking than author of that blog post, I don't feel like I'm forced. You can do there much more than that blog post describe and Roam docs also sucks in explaining what else than writing you can do so it might be a good idea to look for videos in Youtube, Roam dev created some demos and was also interviewed with demo presentations.
  - conaws 7y ago
    One of the devs here - totally true, our help docs and landing page don't really show half of what you can do. Help docs have a lot if you dig around though. Heres a link https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN Really appreciate users like pps who do the work of figuring out how to make Roam work for them at this early stage.

petra 7y ago

That data feels closer to prolog, than to text articles. Since search was the biggest problem with evernote, i'm curious what machine learning could do with the data in roam.

conaws 7y ago
Datalog :)