Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Roam'

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Weekend Reading: Liberal Science, Roam42, and JTBD Examples

February 6, 2021 • #

🧠 In Defense of Being Offensive

Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth.

His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The book is a defense of what he calls ā€œliberal scienceā€, our decentralized process for knowledge discovery that relies on relentless-but-gradual error correction:

Liberal science, by its very nature, has little tolerance for fundamentalism; conversely fundamentalism is a threat to liberal science. Fundamentalism, defined by Rauch as the ā€œsearch for certainty rather than for errors,ā€ is the antithesis of scientific inquiry. Fundamentalism seeks a monopoly on knowledge from which it can deny the beliefs put forth by all others. Rauch even notes that there are fundamentalist free-marketeers—those who refuse to accept the possibility that cherished economic axioms may be flawed, or at least in need of revision—and he challenges them to enhance their intellectual rigor. If classical liberals are willing to accept the self-correcting actions of the marketplace to properly allocate valued resources, they should also allow the self-correcting mechanisms of liberal science to separate knowledge from supposition.

Due to its nature as a decentralized system, liberal science frees knowledge from authoritarian control by self-appointed commissars of truth. ā€œIn an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truth’s being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it,ā€ notes Rauch. Liberal science achieves this end. It avoids despotism in the intellectual realm as it does in those of politics and economics.

āŒØļø Become a Keyboard Pro with Roam42

A great guide here from Ramses at RoamStack

I set up RoamHacker’s Roam42 suite for SmartBlocks a few weeks back, and it’s game-changing. I’m still a novice with it and have only used a few of its tools, but this sort of extensibility and programmability is what’s making Roam the most interesting text platform.

šŸ‘Øā€šŸ’» How to Write Jobs to Be Done Example Statements

This is a solid, brief guide on how to frame Jobs to Be Done statements.

ā€œHelp me brush my teeth in the morningā€Ā isĀ notĀ a great example of a Job to Be Done statement.

ā€œHelp me brush my teeth in the morningā€ is joined at the hip to an existing solution (a toothbrush) and there’s only so far you’ll be able to expand your thinking within that bubble.

A way to describe the Job to Be Done when a person is brushing their teeth that could lead to more innovative product designĀ is:

ā€œKeep my teeth healthy.ā€

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How I Plan My Week with Roam

November 4, 2020 • #

For years Todoist was my tool of choice for task management. When Roam came on the scene for me earlier this year, I’d seen pretty compelling methods from the #roamcult for how to manage todos inside of Roam with its TODO feature. It was an intriguing idea: such a fast and simple way to capture things without leaving the current frame.

But it took me a while to go all-in on Roam for tasks. Todoist was so embedded in my muscle memory, especially with its accessible web and cross-platform mobile apps and its excellent quick-entry ā€œQuick Addā€ flow from the desktop. It was going to require a lot to make the switch to a different system, and one that’s wildly different from the way any other task management app works.

Roam Weekly Planning

I eventually took the plunge, moved all my pending tasks over to a Roam page from Todoist, and started to come up with a process. I was first just managing tasks from a giant temporary ā€œInboxā€ page, but over time I learned better how I wanted to fit them in with the advantages of a Roam-based daily workflow.

Though the switch to Roam for task management gives up some useful abilities with dedicated favorites like Todoist or Things, the gains with managing tasks alongside the rest of my knowledge graph are well worth the trade-offs. Most task management tools have way too many features for my needs, anyway. Here are just a few things I love about this process so far:

  • You can insert todos in context — Being able to quickly slot todos anywhere is beautiful. As you’re writing other notes specific to projects, meetings, phone calls, articles, or anything else, you can Cmd-Enter and add something right as you’re thinking of it. This method ends up being a solid ā€œubiquitous captureā€ flow similar to what you’d do with Todoist or OmniFocus inboxes.
  • The [[TODO]] page, pinned to the sidebar — This lets you quickly dredge up all of your todos regardless of where you scattered them. Use this plus filters to drill in to specific areas. A solid ā€œinboxā€ equivalent to process your todos into other places.
  • Add tags to filter for context — If you’re familiar with [GTD’s contexts](https://evomend.net/en/what-not-gtd-context/ ā€œContexts in), you’ll recognize this. I add tags to tasks so I can filter for all [[TODO]] tagged #Email, for example. Now let’s go over how I plan out my week with Roam.

My Weekly Process

At the beginning of each week, I start out by creating a new page for the week ahead, dated starting on Mondays. So this week’s page is [[šŸ“† Weekly Plan: 2020/11/02]]. I just focus into the search bar and type it out.

For the page template I start out with sections for Weekly Goals and Daily Goals. The first I treat like a general holding area for tasks I want to work on in the upcoming week, and the latter I include a block for each day. Then I manually add in the dates for each day with Roam’s /date picker slash command (/today and /tomorrow can also be useful here, if relevant)1. To make all of this faster, I use a TextExpander snippet to automatically insert the basics. Typing rcwp stamps in my basic template2:

- # Weekly Goals
    - 
- # Daily Goals
    - Monday: 
    - Tuesday:
    - Wednesday: 
    - Thursday: 
    - Friday:

When I started down this workflow path, I initially thought it’d be annoying to have to set up a new page each week. But so far it’s actually been valuable to force a start-of-week planning session to think through what I want to get done. Usually on Sunday nights I’ll go in and make the Weekly Plan page, then pull up my [[Projects]] page, [[Blog Ideas]], [[TODO]], or even my page from the previous week to look for all of the various tasks I might want to focus on.

Using the sidebar helps a lot here. I’ll pop open other pages with a Shift-click, then drag over todos I want to work on under the Weekly Goals section. If I want the todo to actually stay where it is and not move it to the Weekly Plan page, I use Roam’s Alt-click and drag to bring over a block reference instead of the entire block itself. This is a neat way to keep todos in the right place, but have a reference to them in your task plan. There’s an example of this in the video below, where I’ve got a trip planning project page with tasks on it that I want to stay there, but still see in my weekly view.

Once I’ve got a batch of tasks entered under the week, I’ll start queueing them up into their appropriate days. Some things have deadlines or due dates I’m trying to manage to, so need to get done at specific times. Others I’ll just leave in the Weekly section until I know when I plan to do it. Regularly on weekday mornings I’ll go to my plan and pull in what I want to get done that day. It’s a living document until the week is over, a part of my morning routine to go to this page.

My favorite thing about this process is how it manifests your tasks on the Daily Notes page. Because the Daily Note automatically displays references to any page that includes that day’s date, you get a slick little embedded list of the day’s tasks. The Daily Notes view is my default working mode during a typical work day, so this is an excellent place to have all of those queued up activities available on the same page where I’m taking meeting notes and the like.

Tasks embedded in Daily Notes

Areas for Improvement

After about 2 months committed to this process, it’s pretty solid for me. I’m not missing as much from my old workflow as I thought I would, and I’m enjoying the benefits of Roam’s graph structure too much to reconsider now. Plus the potential is high that the lightning-fast Roam team will add improvements to all this.

Todoist’s Quick Add is something I’d love an equivalent for somehow in Roam. The Capture mobile entry web app that Roam has isn’t bad, but it’s not that fast for adding new items quickly while on the go. To fill in this gap now I’ll usually just throw things into a sheet in Drafts which gets processed later back at my desk.

Multiplayer abilities were something I never took advantage of in Todoist, but are a key piece of any work (or even family) project management usage. Roam’s recent additions in support of multiplayer look promising here, but that hasn’t been relevant to me just yet. Multiuser project management (that tools like Asana excel at) is a beast in itself to solve.

Managing dates isn’t as smooth as in most task management apps, but there are some advantages I really do like. For any task entered anywhere in your graph, you can add a future date to it and have it magically appear in Daily Notes references that day to jog your memory. A feature that no task management tool other than OmniFocus ever supported, but I’ve wanted ever since, is the idea of a Start Date. With that you could put in something you want to remember, but for later, put ā€œin 90 daysā€ next to it and it would disappear until resurfacing then. It was a great way to put in things you know you needed to remember, but don’t need to continue seeing in your list for weeks until it’s relevant. Dating your todos like the above is similar in concept: tagging them with a date 3 months out will make them pop back up when they need to be considered.

The Future

From what I’ve seen in Twitter discussions about the incoming Roam API, I’m hopeful that its hyperactive developer community will jump right into building applications on Roam for workflows like this. A dedicated, customizable app specifically for task management built on the ā€œRoam platformā€ would be a phenomenal tool worthy of driving its own second-order revenue for a developer. Thinking about David Crandall’s piece on the prospects of Roam as a service layer, there’s so much potential for it to power its own developer marketplace.

In the next post I’ll go over my current workflow for using Daily Notes. It’s an interesting companion to this process of task management.

  1. If I was fancier I could probably add this logic to my TextExpander snippet, but adding dates manually doesn’t bother me.Ā 

  2. This setup will look familiar if you’ve seen Nat Eliason’s Effortless Output course. I also found this Alfred workflow with a similar template.Ā 

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Weekend Reading: Options Over Roadmaps, Ghost, and Spaced Repetition

September 12, 2020 • #

šŸ›£ Options, Not Roadmaps

An option is something you can do but don’t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycle—or never.

Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.

I know Basecamp is always the industry outlier with these things, but the thoughts on roadmaps are probably more true for many companies in reality than we’d all like to admit. We tend to look at things in a sort of hybrid way — not a fully baked roadmap with timelines, but a general list of roughly-sorted candidates that gain more and more momentum as we shape them out and prioritize. Every product team has a list of ideas 10x+ longer than anything they can build, so optionality is required to make the right decisions.

🚁 Anduril Ghost 4

Defense tech startup Anduril’s latest hardware, the Ghost UAV system. A pretty impressive and unique modular design for an unmanned platform.

šŸ—‚ Guide to Roam’s Spaced Repetition

Roam launched an interesting new feature (Ī”) for setting up spaced repetition flows in your graph.

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Readwise and Roam Research

September 8, 2020 • #

If I tracked my time spent in software tools, I’m pretty sure over the last 8 months Roam and Readwise would be top of the list.

All of my writing, note-taking, idea logs, and (increasingly) to-dos happen now in Roam. Since getting serious with it around the beginning of the quarantine, I haven’t used any other tool for writing things down.

I discovered Readwise about a year ago and it quickly entered routine use. My backlog of meticulously-kept-but-underused Kindle highlights was immediately made valuable through Readwise’s daily reviews. The ability to have my highlights deliver recurring value (compound interest!) has made more both more compelled to read and definitely more compelled to highlight and make notes.

Readwise to Roam integration

One of the favorite uses I’ve discovered for Roam is to make literature notes from books. I’ll page back through a book after finishing it, review highlighted passages, and translate the key ideas and takeaways into a Roam note. The process takes a little time, but is well worth the effort for the resulting outcome. Paging back through usually turns into a light re-read or skim, not just reading the highlights but what also might be worth extracting adjacent to highlights that I didn’t include on the first read. I suppose this is similar to ā€œprogressive summarization,ā€ but I’m not following a consistent process here, just doing what feels natural. When I recently went through How Innovation Works to build notes, it took 2-3 hours to translate the highlights into literature note form in my Roam graph. Then perhaps another 30 minutes to an hour to skim back over the notes to clean them up and add links to other pages.

Combining it all

All of these tools and processes make for a powerful system of study. Extracting and linking ideas between sources is fascinating so far as a means for concretely visualizing how ideas bridge between authors. And most importantly, it gives you a resource to mine for remixing source material into your own novel ideas.

A few weeks ago I got early access to Readwise’s latest big feature: direct integration with Roam. Even in beta after only a few weeks of usage, it’s been an amazing addition to this workflow. Let’s dive into how it works.

Readwise ā­¢ Roam

First of all, it’s great that this feature works with highlights from any object type. Books, articles, podcasts, and Twitter threads can all be included in your Roam sync, giving more power to Roam as a system-of-record for collected knowledge.

When you set up the sync the first time, you can select item by item what you want to sync into Roam. If you want something to resurface in Readwise, but don’t need or want it in Roam, you can exclude things to your liking. Since it’s in beta, I’ve been selectively pulling in a few at a time each day just to go through them and see how they look on the Roam side (more on this step in a minute).

Highlights example page in Roam Highlights example page in Roam

Once your highlights are pushed over into Roam, Readwise publishes a new page with (highlights) appended to the name, and includes a few metadata elements at the top that you can customize to your liking in the sync configuration. One of my favorite things is how it appends highlights under a new block named ā€œHighlights synced by Readwise [[September 9th, 2020]]ā€, which cleverly functions both as a historical record of when the highlights came in inside the page, but also shows up in your Daily Notes as a sort of log of your daily reading activity.

Over the past few weeks the Readwise team has already made some additions to the syncing options, including the ability to customize the metadata it uses (using Roam attributes, the :: method). The defaults have worked fine for me, but it’s good to have this ability for future tweaks to the PKM process. It’ll also include links to the highlight location, which (in the case of Kindle) deep-link to the location in the Kindle app, or with podcasts (from Airr) to the AirrQuote you saved.

Readwise logs in Daily Notes Readwise logs in Daily Notes

Another addition to this workflow I’ve been tinkering with is how to integrate these into the rest of my Roam knowledge graph. Every couple of days I’ve been scrolling back through each page of synced highlights and annotating them with bi-directional links to key terms, ideas, or other pages — basically stitching them in with other content already in my Roam graph. Over time as I look back at previous evergreen notes or when I’m writing new pages, this will provide references at-hand for incorporating into new material in the knowledge graph. This has all the workings of a set of simple tools designed to do what Sƶnke Ahrens talked about at length in How to Take Smart Notes. Roam, Readwise, and Instapaper are working together to provide a slipstream for knowledge to enter the database, but in a living, breathing way (not just dumping notes into the archive).

The feature just publicly launched this week to all Readwise users, so it’s still early. But so far this is an excellent addition to an already-excellent set of tools for personal knowledge management.

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Tiago Learns Roam

September 2, 2020 • #

Tiago Forte and Conor White-Sullivan call a truce in the Twitter knowledge management feud.

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Digital Organization with Roam Research

July 24, 2020 • #

YouTube creator Ali Abdaal put together a great extended overview video on Roam. Good examples of the core features of the product, and interesting techniques for how to organize notes.

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Weekend Reading: Quarantine Talks

July 11, 2020 • #

šŸ›  Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress

Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series.

🧠 How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg

A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the ā€œbuilding a second brainā€ concept.

šŸ‘‹šŸ¼ Take a Tour of HEY

Great example of how to do a product demo. Informal style, clearly prepared but not ā€œscripted,ā€ and deep care and attention to the product.

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Getting Comfortable with Roam

April 15, 2020 • #

Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. I’ve written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how it’s working for me so far.

What is it?

Roam is a tool for note-taking, described as a tool for ā€œnetworked thought.ā€ With a glance on Twitter you’ll find all sorts of comparison pieces to Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. I’ve tried all of those (Notion for quite a bit) and I find the experience of using Roam completely different.

Roam Research

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, 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 ā€œpagesā€), 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. Making new pages is a matter of double-bracketing any word or phrase. With a quick piece of formatting which Roam autocompletes, [[Knowledge Management]] gets its own page, from which I can view the other Linked References. The Linked Reference is the secret weapon, a killer idea well-executed in Roam’s simplistic but blazing fast interface. Each page also detects and shows ā€œUnlinkedā€ references, places where a string appears without an explicit link.

I described it to someone through analogy to a CRM. Roam is a CRM for ideas: call it ā€œIdea Relationship Management.ā€ Since I’ve been using it as a sort of productivity journal (Tiago Forte calls this the ā€œsecond brain, 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.

The Graph

The idea graph is what breaks you free of organizational burden. The need to find where to put thinsg, once a point of friction in note-taking (that is, if you ever wanted to be able to find a piece of jotted information again) is gone, replaced by a new way to navigate your knowledge graph via organically produced links.

My Roam database graph

Here’s a scenario that happens all the time to me (and I’m sure others) that no other tool has handled well until now:

I walk into a product marketing meeting. During the meeting we’re going to solidify our messaging strategy and requirements for a new feature launch. I open up a new file for the meeting Product marketing sync — 2020-04-13 or similar is a typical nomenclature. That file likely contains bullets and a series of messy individual lines related to things each person is going to do, topics people mentioned, action items for myself (which need to go elsewhere to have a prayer of being remembered). However, interspersed within the discussion I jot random thoughts on sometimes semi-related topics, but sometimes something completely off the reservation, that I still want to capture. During the marketing discussion I get an idea for a future blog post with a couple of topics. Where does that go?

Most commonly today the answer is ā€œnowhereā€ and I’m lucky if I remember it again. In Roam I just type it in a ā€œRandomā€ subsection in the bottom of my meeting notes. Who cares where it goes if I can link that by topic from elsewhere?

A quick tip: next to any random, non-sequitur thought like this, put #idea next to it. That then becomes its own page, with Linked References collecting up all the ideas dispersed through your graph.

I love that I can navigate to an abstract idea, like my page about ā€œAntifragility,ā€ and find all of the articles, books, or other notes that connected with that idea. The ROI happens with Roam once you start rediscovering links or ideas you already noted without making the connection beforehand. It’s like stitching together threads that would have been previously in silos, invisible to one another. If you then also separate those notes in time, its nigh impossible to keep those connections front of mind. I haven’t been using Roam very long yet, but even in a few weeks I stumble back onto notes I wrote that I don’t remember writing.

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.

Use Cases

I find myself taking notes on all sorts of things I never used to, or at least rarely did. Here are a few:

  • Books (I did do this before, but very intermittently and selectively)
  • Articles
  • Podcasts
  • YouTube videos
  • Meetings, 1:1s, and other work conversations
  • Useful reference info for around the house (measurements of spaces, home inventory, and more)
  • CRM-style notes on people (more on this in a second)

Most of that I’ve never kept running notes for, but Roam makes it actually fun to make notes on all of these things. Since I put date tags on a lot of my notes files (if relevant), notching back through the days shows Linked References to things I was working on those days.

For people, any time I have a call or meeting I’ll include a ā€œPeopleā€ line with links on all their names. Likewise for any mention of them in other pages. Then navigating to a person shows those LRs to all the relevant notes, ideas, conversations, often linked from Daily Notes, so there’s a visible timeline to the references. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen yet to the mythical personal CRM I’ve seen reference to.

Daily Notes

A knowledge graph needs some form of interface to navigate around it. Without the top-down hierarchy of a file tree, the root page of a structureless content database would typically feature search as an entry point for navigation. Roam does have an excellent page search, but it has another anchor that I love: Daily Notes. Each day Roam automatically creates a new date-stamped page for that day, which is the default main page when you open the app. What’s great about this for such a free form system is that you always have that anchor to link from. If you want a new page for a fleeting idea but are worried a new page will be disjointed from your universe of ideas, and don’t want to search for another page that idea might fit, just spawn it off of Daily Notes. Make a ā€œRandomā€ or ā€œIdeasā€ section for the day and add it. I’ve been using this technique for quick stuff and it serves a couple of useful purposes:

  1. Daily Notes functions for me like a productivity journal, a rough record of what I was doing, working on, or thinking about that day.
  2. If a random idea links from a Daily Note and then contains a few bullets of thoughts, navigating back to it weeks later always has a fallback method of tracking back through previous days’ notes to find it.

An added cool thing here, thanks to Linked Reference backlinks, is that any page in which you insert today’s date shows up as a LR under that day.

What I notice in regular usage of Roam, with Daily Notes as the ā€œhome screenā€ of the tool, is thought taking on an organic structure. The links grow and the dots connect as you’re working. Going and forming connections or describing the organization of your thoughts never need be done with intent — it’s all implied as you’re writing.

In the month that I’ve been actively using it, I have Roam open on my second display all day, with notes continually flowing into the database as they happen. In all the other note-taking tools and systems I’ve used in the past, the friction for tracking ideas was never this low.

TODOs

Any line can be converted into a to-do with a checkbox, which then appears in a special [[TODO]] page that Roam automatically manages. It’s super fast to toss things in there to remember later, regardless of page locations. I pin the TODO page into my sidebar for quick access. Cmd-enter on any line converts it into a to-do.

Since I’m a Todoist user for all of this before, I’m now waffling on which tool I should use for tasks. I’m still in both, but I can see some hope for eventually moving all of that into Roam since it’s solving so many other things related to productivity management. The main struggle is that capture into a to-do list inbox (like what I do with Todoist) from mobile isn’t great yet. Browsing to Roam on your phone takes you to a simple ā€œQuick Captureā€ interface, which inserts blocks into a #Quick Capture section in your daily notes. This is great to have for the random passing thought to go somewhere, but as I’ve used it so far it still requires me to fold those into appropriate places I want them after the fact. Not bad for ideas, but I’d prefer something more devoted to true to-dos for that purpose.

Another random tip: Questions dawn on me all the time I don’t know the answer to, but want to remember to revisit. At the end of the line I’ll just type a #?? tag. Browsing to the [[??]] page then aggregates all the open questions. h/t to Matthieu Bizien who simplified this for me.

The #roamcult

Just search that hashtag and you’ll find a community of hundreds of super active, impassioned Roam users all out there evangelizing the product. In some ways, its spartan user interface, semi-opaque shortcuts and tricks about how it works promote cult-like adoption patterns. Its learning curve becomes a badge of honor for a certain type of user. Getting over the hump after a few days of heavy usage delivers a sense of satisfaction if you’re able to tame it to do your bidding.

Some of the product limitations in terms of help and onboarding to expose its power-user features are a function of a small, focused team of a few with a lot to build. Right now it’s a power-user tool designed by its intended users. With growth, they plan to expand their product design team which I’m sure will change this rapidly. But it does seem that they’ve embraced the product’s opacity to promote the #roamcult. Hopping into the public Slack or looking at videos of how people use it on YouTube will give you an insight into how obsessed the early users are.

More Reading

The Roam white paper is an excellent resource, recommended to anyone curious about the product direction and the core ideas driving its development. Founder Conor White-Sullivan also has a number of video interviews on YouTube that I found super insightful to get a background on why the product works the way it does. He’s also an interesting person in general, and a great Twitter follow.

Roam has clicked for me as the tool for notes I didn’t know I needed. I’m still learning new ways of using it. It’s fun how adaptive Roam is to change; the process of discovery of new ways of Knowledge Management is rewarding. I can just start formatting a new page however I want, and it doesn’t damage the graph of interconnections.

I’m excited to see where the product goes as it continues to take off.

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Weekend Reading: Readwise with Roam, WWI Naval Intelligence, and Interaction Density

April 4, 2020 • #

šŸ“– Readwise2Roam

I’m liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come in handy, though, if I want to pull all highlights directly from Readwise (which I’m still loving, use it every day).

⛓ How computational power—or its absence—shaped World War naval battles

How the battlecruiser in the early 20th century gave the British a birds-eye view of their fleet before the days of aerial photography, radar, or satellites:

To achieve his vision of a centrally controlled battlecruiser force, Fisher needed a clear picture of the threats. So he set up a top-secret room in the Admiralty building where intelligence reports and shipping news from all over the world were aggregated onto large maps that showed the positions of every friendly and known enemy ship.

This was known as the Admiralty plot. Unlike the displays you might see in a modern military headquarters (which may be updated every few minutes or seconds), these paper maps had a ā€œrefresh rateā€ of hours or even days. But they were nonetheless revolutionary, because for the first time in history a centralized commander could look at a representation of the world naval situation, with every friendly force and known enemy force tracked all around the world in nearly real time. The British leadership could then issue commands accordingly.

šŸ“² Interaction Density

This is one of the best arguments to describe why ā€œproā€ users on multitouch devices have so much frustration trying to achieve the same levels of productivity they can on a desktop. Even with quality applications, for certain types of work, an iPad can feel like you’re handcuffed.

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