How My Time with Roam Research Improved My Notion Workspace
I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary with Notion, but I’m still tinkering with my set-up, sometimes in big ways.
My most recent experiment included a tour of Roam Research, to see if I could incorporate any of what makes it so appealing into my Notion workspace.
Here’s what I learned:
The idea is the thing
Roam emphasizes the value of building a workspace around your ideas. Its linking of pages means that you are always being reminded of what you’ve read and what you’ve thought on a topic.
My “Resources” database in Notion used to live near the back end of my workspace, almost as an appendix. Sometimes I would add items to an inbox, if it was important or something I wanted to read. Most items, however, would go straight to Resources. The “collector’s fallacy” is real.
Now I have a linked database on my dashboard that shows all of the Resources I’ve gathered and not processed for the previous week. It functions as a second task list but is dedicated to ideas and creative projects.
Caveat clipper
It’s not as easy to get information into Roam — it doesn’t have a web clipper, and you can’t use the share sheet — which I didn’t appreciate. That said, it made me be more deliberate in what I bring into Notion.
To introduce a piece of information into your workspace is an investment of sorts. Even if you never look at it again, it takes time to bring it in and sort it. As a result, Roam made me realize the importance of weighty material. If it’s not worth taking notes on, then it’s probably not worth spending time with.
Make the connections
Roam prides itself on its “bi-directional linking,” which is a clever bit of spin, given that it’s not altogether unique in its ability to connect information in more than one way. Notion too permits this through its relational databases and tags. If I were writing an article on race and higher education, for example, I could run a filter to search for all of the related tags, which even Roam cannot do.
I have goals/projects, tasks, notes, and meetings/events all linked together, which means the relevant information from one appears in the database of another. But I have been more deliberate in making sure that everything is properly linked. Notion is great at bringing it all together, but, as with Roam, it’s not going to do the work for you. The “roll up” feature in Notion is especially handy when you need to need to connect information that’s spread throughout more than one property in another database. Roam can’t touch Notion on that front.
Writing, writing, and more writing
I also appreciated Roam’s concept of the “Daily Note,” the big blank page that greets you when you first open Roam every day. Most Notion dashboards, my old one included, are filled with pages, toggles, and lists of key information, but, perhaps from an occasional scratch pad, there’s nowhere to write. Now my main page has nothing but the icons for the other main pages in my dashboard, which I’ve kept in a column off to the side, so there’s nothing to stop me from putting words on a page and capture what I’m thinking.
Writing in Roam was so much fun that I did a ton of it. One recurring topic was how to make use of Roam. Writing about your workflow is a great way to improve it, just like writing about your thoughts are a great way to clarify them. This article started on my Notion homepage about how I wanted to modify my workspace after returning from Roam.
I’ve also started using a different prompt for my daily writing — more about what I’m curious about and where my attention should be than about what I’m doing or feeling. Personal journaling can be of great value, if you’re wrestling your way through an important decision or emotion of some kind. But it can be a distraction if your intent is to use it as a way to be creative and productive.
Structure is overrated
Roam doesn’t have the kind of nesting functions that Notion does, so it does all of its work through linking and filtering of pages, which is a much more efficient way of storing and accessing information.
After returning from Roam, I combined my list of future media consumption (books, articles, films, television shows, podcasts, etc.) to the Resources database to make it part of my daily processing. Instead of having its own database, I use tags for type and link them to projects in another database. Bridesmaids and The Big Short might both be in my Resources database and tagged as “films,” but only one of them will be linked to the research project on economics that I’m working on. (Sadly, it’s not Bridesmaids, which means I might have to wait to watch it for the twenty-first time.) I also started using more filters to create specialized views, instead of making a more complicated structure — as I did with my media list.
Although it was initially somewhat disturbing, I quickly started to appreciate Roam’s lack of structure. I found myself reviewing the messiness that is the Daily Note and seeing how I chronicled my thoughts and activities. My Notion workspace will never be as disordered as my Roam graph was, but Roam taught me that structure can be overdone, especially if it interferes with thinking. Everything does not have to have its right place.
My last two weeks
Even if every revision to my Notion layout has not been an improvement, I’ve learned something valuable not only about how I work but how else I could be working.
My time on Roam was intense. What it does, it does very well, but it’s not for me. Notion’s flexibility is its great virtue — which I intend on putting to good use.
