Roam — If You Want To

My time with Roam Research

The year is 2031. The nation-state system, which had been the dominant international order since 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, has crumbled. One dominant social and cultural group functions as a de facto world government.

None of these leaders are elected. The legitimacy of this elite class is not questioned because their edicts, issued in the form of YouTube videos and blog posts, are simple if not obvious solutions to all of humankind’s pressing problems. What these minds all have in common is that they all use the same platform for note taking: Roam Research.

This vision, although a bit fanciful if not dystopian, would not sound impossible to the early adopters of Roam — aka, the Roam Cult.

If you’ve been paying attention to productivity spaces, you’ve heard by now of Roam, a writing and research tool — as the platform du jour. As someone who likes to distract myself with new and shiny apps, I was eager to see what Roam has to offer, so I spent a couple of weeks with it, to see if it lives up to the hype.

In appearance, Roam is most similar to Workflowy and Dynalist, in that it works from a bulletpoint list of embedded pages. Its “bi-directional linking” means that every page contains links to every other page where the title of that page is linked or mentioned. Notes on a book, for example, are automatically connected to the notes from every other book you’ve read by that author or on that topic you’ve identified. Rather than letting ideas and information pass though us like cheap beer, the purpose of Roam is to make sure that our intake is not only filling but, most important for knowledge workers, is remembered and retrievable.

I was especially taken by the “Daily Note,” which is the dated page that greets you every day you first sign in to Roam. Other than any links you have to the date from your previous pages that appear at the bottom, it’s inviting in a way I have not experienced with other apps. As someone who’s been trying to create a morning writing habit, I easily hit 1000 words without taking my first drink of tea. My average daily output hit 3000 words without much effort, and it would have been higher had I not been so inconvenienced by the job that pays the bills.

As the Roam web page explains:

We believe that writing is a tool for thinking. If we can build a tool for helping people write and organize their ideas more effectively, we can help them have better thoughts and solve otherwise intractable problems.

It didn’t take long for me to be drawn into this promised world of ideas and creativity. I not only started spending more time with what I read, but also found myself wanting to seek out more writing of substance, which is a healthy impulse, whatever platform you use.

I couldn’t help but be bothered by my undeveloped workspace and began regretting that I had not kept more and better notes throughout my college career and professional life. (If you read a book and don’t take notes in Roam, did you read it at all?) I was thrilled when a new page pulled up a note I had taken a few days prior on an obscure article I had read. It was working!

OpenAI’s Chelsea Voss put it this way in a tweet:

The thing that’s delighted me about Roam has been how having it open a tab affects my entire attitude about research. I feel like I’m playing learning: the video game.

In addition to taking notes on what I was reading, which is really where Roam excels, I moved my entire life into it: task lists, my personal journal, minutes from meetings. I typed and typed and typed a lot, linking everything that I needed to or thought might come in handy in my new life as a thought leader.

I found myself wanting to spend more and more time on the platform, especially when I was unable to be on it. I stayed up late. I woke up early. When I was not taking notes on what I was reading, I was watching videos on how to take better notes on what I was reading. Zettlekasten, anyone. I began neglecting other projects and parts of my life.

In other words, I was addicted.

It was great that I was making better use of my time, till I realized it was making me quite miserable in the process — so I returned, very happily, to the safe but flexible structure of Notion.

Roam is an amazing tool for a certain type of person who has a certain type of life. If you like to wander off down intellectual rabbit holes with the hope that you will find breadcrumbs to pull you out and if you have time enough to document these explorations, then Roam is for you.

I love the idea of having a personal Wikipedia of everything I have ever thought or read. But I have a strong aversion to being the one who has to put it all together.

As the author of two books, a couple dozen scholarly articles and chapters, and countless other pieces on Medium and elsewhere, I have become quite adept at “reading for writing” — that is, taking notes only on material that will eventually make its way to a published page. Taking notes on everything simply to see it mapped and hope that it will one day be relevant is a colossal waste of time.

Sure, you can use Roam for meeting notes and tasks. But do you really want to live in a world where all of your meetings and the things that were said in them live forever in your daily life? Once was enough, thank you.

There’s also the question of the Roam’s functionality. It looks and feels very beta. Even once you get past over the learning curve of the hot key shortcuts, it’s not easy to get information into or out of Roam. Even Nat Eliason, who put together a Roam-approved course on how to use the platform, has a three-step process for notetaking and copies and pastes text into Google Docs to format it for publication. That might work for articles and quick blog posts, but you’d have to be out of your mind to use it for a book-length manuscript.

I’d prefer some development there, than the focus on the gimmicky “graph overview” of your pages, which is really cool till you realize it doesn’t serve a purpose other than to take up space on the side menu.

Although this is heresy to the Roam Cult, strictly speaking, Notion (linked databases, tags) and even crusty, old Evernote (tags) are also capable of bidirectional linking, if used to their fullest potential. Update: Notion’s new backlinking feature closes this gap even further.

Update 2: After further exploring Roam’s backend, I discovered that although it’s simple to export all of the pages you create, the references that are linked to any one particular page do not appear. That means that if you’re creating content via your Daily Note — that is, using Roam like it’s designed to be used — you are locking yourself into this new (and expensive) platform, or you are doing nothing more than generating a series of interesting date-based journal entries. This, I imagine, would be a deal breaker for many.

As with any tool, you should try it out on a couple test-case projects before taking the plunge, even if Roam makes it difficult to just dip your toe in. Roam comes with a free 31-day trial, then it’s $15 a month (with many discount options) or $500 for the five-year believer plan.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who can benefit from what Roam does and are in a position to use it. Most of us are not. But even if you are, you should know that your Roam will not be built in a day.