For the last few months Iāve been using Alexander Rinkās Roam CSS system, which heās recently released out of beta. The Quattro theme heās developed is excellent, a look that models the iA Writer app for macOS.
This system has a documented library of variables you can customize. I went in and made a few tweaks to mine for some colors and highlights here and there, but the base is awesome.
Roam theming is pretty easy to set up. Iāve got a number of themes set up that I can toggle between.
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 āliberal 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 āsearch 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-marketeersāthose who refuse to accept the possibility that cherished economic axioms may be flawed, or at least in need of revisionāand 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. āIn an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truthās 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.
I set up RoamHackerās Roam42 suite for SmartBlocks a few weeks back, and itās game-changing. Iām still a novice with it and have only used a few of its tools, but this sort of extensibility and programmability is whatās making Roam the most interesting text platform.
This is a solid, brief guide on how to frame Jobs to Be Done statements.
āHelp me brush my teeth in the morningāĀ isĀ notĀ a great example of a Job to Be Done statement.
āHelp me brush my teeth in the morningā is joined at the hip to an existing solution (a toothbrush) and thereās only so far youāll 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:
For years Todoist was my tool of choice for task management. When Roam came on the scene for me earlier this year, Iād 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 āQuick Addā flow from the desktop. It was going to require a lot to make the switch to a different system, and one thatās wildly different from the way any other task management app works.
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 āInboxā 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 āĀ Being able to quickly slot todos anywhere is beautiful. As youāre writing other notes specific to projects, meetings, phone calls, articles, or anything else, you can Cmd-Enter and add something right as youāre thinking of it. This method ends up being a solid āubiquitous captureā flow similar to what youād do with Todoist or OmniFocus inboxes.
The [[TODO]] page, pinned to the sidebar ā 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 āinboxā equivalent to process your todos into other places.
Add tags to filter for context āĀ If youāre familiar with [GTDās contexts](https://evomend.net/en/what-not-gtd-context/ āContexts in), youāll recognize this. I add tags to tasks so I can filter for all [[TODO]] tagged #Email, for example.
Now letās 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 weekās page is [[š 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 Roamās /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:
When I started down this workflow path, I initially thought itād be annoying to have to set up a new page each week. But so far itās actually been valuable to force a start-of-week planning session to think through what I want to get done. Usually on Sunday nights Iāll 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. Iāll 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 Roamās 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. Thereās an example of this in the video below, where Iāve got a trip planning project page with tasks on it that I want to stay there, but still see in my weekly view.
Once Iāve got a batch of tasks entered under the week, Iāll start queueing them up into their appropriate days. Some things have deadlines or due dates Iām trying to manage to, so need to get done at specific times. Others Iāll just leave in the Weekly section until I know when I plan to do it. Regularly on weekday mornings Iāll go to my plan and pull in what I want to get done that day. Itās 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 dayās date, you get a slick little embedded list of the dayās 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 Iām taking meeting notes and the like.
Areas for Improvement
After about 2 months committed to this process, itās pretty solid for me. Iām not missing as much from my old workflow as I thought I would, and Iām enjoying the benefits of Roamās graph structure too much to reconsider now. Plus the potential is high that the lightning-fast Roam team will add improvements to all this.
Todoistās Quick Add is something Iād love an equivalent for somehow in Roam. The Capture mobile entry web app that Roam has isnāt bad, but itās not that fast for adding new items quickly while on the go. To fill in this gap now Iāll 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. Roamās recent additions in support of multiplayer look promising here, but that hasnāt been relevant to me just yet. Multiuser project management (that tools like Asana excel at) is a beast in itself to solve.
Managing dates isnāt 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 Iāve 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 āin 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 donāt need to continue seeing in your list for weeks until itās 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 Iāve seen in Twitter discussions about the incoming Roam API, Iām 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 āRoam platformā would be a phenomenal tool worthy of driving its own second-order revenue for a developer. Thinking about David Crandallās piece on the prospects of Roam as a service layer, thereās so much potential for it to power its own developer marketplace.
In the next post Iāll go over my current workflow for using Daily Notes. Itās an interesting companion to this process of task management.
If I was fancier I could probably add this logic to my TextExpander snippet, but adding dates manually doesnāt bother me.Ā ↩
This setup will look familiar if youāve seen Nat Eliasonās Effortless Output course. I also found this Alfred workflow with a similar template.Ā ↩
This is one of the best descriptions Iāve seen for why Roam is different than the peers itās often compared to:
Today Roam is a powerful single-player tool that you can think of as a functional reactive coding environment for remixing your own thoughts. Use cases extend from grocery lists all the way to conceptual SQL scripts for your ideas.
Co-founder Conor White-Sullivan has compared Roam to Excel as both are products with āa low floor and a high ceiling.ā You donāt have to start using Excel by using pivot tables. Itās the same product no matter how advanced you are as a user. But, like with Excel, you get more power out of Roam as you get better at using it.
With the Roam team currently hard at work on an open API layer, itās going to be wild to see the diversity of tools people build on top of it.
An option is something you can do but donāt have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycleāor never.
Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We donāt 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 weād all like to admit. We tend to look at things in a sort of hybrid way āĀ 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.
If I tracked my time spent in software tools, Iām 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 havenāt 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 Readwiseās 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.
One of the favorite uses Iāve discovered for Roam is to make literature notes from books. Iāll 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 didnāt include on the first read. I suppose this is similar to āprogressive summarization,ā but Iām 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 Readwiseās latest big feature: direct integration with Roam. Even in beta after only a few weeks of usage, itās been an amazing addition to this workflow. Letās dive into how it works.
Readwise ā¢ Roam
First of all, itās 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 donāt need or want it in Roam, you can exclude things to your liking. Since itās in beta, Iāve 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
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 āHighlights 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 itās good to have this ability for future tweaks to the PKM process. Itāll 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
Another addition to this workflow Iāve been tinkering with is how to integrate these into the rest of my Roam knowledge graph. Every couple of days Iāve been scrolling back through each page of synced highlights and annotating them with bi-directional links to key terms, ideas, or other pages āĀ basically stitching them in with other content already in my Roam graph. Over time as I look back at previous evergreen notes or when Iām 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 itās still early. But so far this is an excellent addition to an already-excellent set of tools for personal knowledge management.
Today Nat Eliason launched version 2 of his Effortless Output course for learning Roam.
This time around heās doing an interesting thing with live courses and students selecting a capstone project. Adding something that goes beyond the typical online video self-paced learning style of most tutorials is fascinating.
This is a course about creating something new, not just how to use Roam. Together weāll pick an area youāre interested in to explore as you develop your skills with Roam, and a final product you want to create with your newfound abilities.
For advanced learning of any sort of craft (and Iād call quality note-taking a craft, for sure), hands-on learning is the only way to go. Itās too easy to watch clips of someone else working, then get stuck with a āblank canvasā problem when you try to get started yourself.
Very interested to see how this works out! It could show some interesting results to help improve other online learning resources.
The Roam ecosystem is rapidly expanding these days. Itās on its way to becoming platform beyond personal knowledge management āĀ an operating system for ideas, thinking, knowledge synthesis, and writing.
Ramses Oudt and Francis Miller (creator of RoamBrain) put together a new learning newsletter with lessons on how to get the most out of Roam and its surrounding orbit of tools and add-ons.
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.
Roam Research already has a deep community of users coalescing around it, building extensions, custom styles, and poking at the edges of how it could be extended.
In this post, David Crandall outlines some possibilities of what could be in Roamās future, breaking it out into various ideas at the presentation, service, and database layers. His diagram does a great job articulating what else could be possible with an open Roam API.
Roam's layers
Especially interesting to me:
Abilities to selectively expose pages from a graph to the public, for cross-linking to from othersā Roam graphs
Linking to blocks in public graphs (like literary works on RoamPublic)
Integrations with apps like David mentions ā Drafts, Zapier, Shortcuts
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. Iāve written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how itās working for me so far.
What is it?
Roam is a tool for note-taking, described as a tool for ānetworked thought.ā With a glance on Twitter youāll find all sorts of comparison pieces to Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. Iāve tried all of those (Notion for quite a bit) and I find the experience of using Roam completely different.
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 donāt always want to deal with filing things logically, itās easy to end up with thoughts and ideas out of place, caught up and buried in meeting notes because thatās 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 āpagesā), you just make a new one anywhere. All pages are peers. Itās 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 Roamās simplistic but blazing fast interface. Each page also detects and shows āUnlinkedā 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 āIdea Relationship Management.ā Since Iāve been using it as a sort of productivity journal (Tiago Forte calls this the āsecond brain, living in it the whole work day. Itās like an operating system for managing information āĀ 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.
Hereās a scenario that happens all the time to me (and Iām sure others) that no other tool has handled well until now:
I walk into a product marketing meeting. During the meeting weāre 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 āĀ 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 ānowhereā and Iām lucky if I remember it again. In Roam I just type it in a āRandomā 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 āAntifragility,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. Itās 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 havenāt been using Roam very long yet, but even in a few weeks I stumble back onto notes I wrote that I donāt 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 āĀ 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 Iāve 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 Iāll include a āPeopleā 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 thereās a visible timeline to the references. Itās the closest thing Iāve seen yet to the mythical personalCRM Iāve 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. Whatās 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 donāt want to search for another page that idea might fit, just spawn it off of Daily Notes. Make a āRandomā or āIdeasā section for the day and add it. Iāve been using this technique for quick stuff and it serves a couple of useful purposes:
Daily Notes functions for me like a productivity journal, a rough record of what I was doing, working on, or thinking about that day.
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 daysā notes to find it.
An added cool thing here, thanks to Linked Reference backlinks, is that any page in which you insert todayās date shows up as a LR under that day.
What I notice in regular usage of Roam, with Daily Notes as the āhome screenā of the tool, is thought taking on an organic structure. The links grow and the dots connect as youāre working. Going and forming connections or describing the organization of your thoughts never need be done with intent āĀ itās all implied as youāre writing.
In the month that Iāve 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 Iāve 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. Itās 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 Iām a Todoist user for all of this before, Iām now waffling on which tool I should use for tasks. Iām still in both, but I can see some hope for eventually moving all of that into Roam since itās 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 isnāt great yet. Browsing to Roam on your phone takes you to a simple āQuick 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 Iāve 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 Iād prefer something more devoted to true to-dos for that purpose.
Another random tip: Questions dawn on me all the time I donāt know the answer to, but want to remember to revisit. At the end of the line Iāll 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 youāll 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 youāre 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 itās a power-user tool designed by its intended users. With growth, they plan to expand their product design team which Iām sure will change this rapidly. But it does seem that theyāve embraced the productās 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. Heās also an interesting person in general, and a great Twitter follow.
Roam has clicked for me as the tool for notes I didnāt know I needed. Iām still learning new ways of using it. Itās 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 doesnāt damage the graph of interconnections.
Iām excited to see where the product goes as it continues to take off.
Iām 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 Iām still loving, use it every day).
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 ārefresh 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.
This is one of the best arguments to describe why āproā 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 youāre handcuffed.
Iām deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it ānetworked thoughtā) thatās hard to do in a linear note document. Iāve been working up a post on Roam and where I feel it fitting into my own workflow.
This piece gives a good overview of it and how itās different from other knowledge management systems.
