- So a few months ago,
I discovered this fancy
new note taking app
called Roam Research and
not gonna lie initially,
I was a bit sceptical,
but I've now been using it
pretty much every day for the
last four months.
It has transformed my
workflow in certain ways.
And so in this video,
I'll break down exactly
how and why I use Roam.
And we'll go over some of the
features and the drawbacks.
So you can decide whether
it's the right app for you.
Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
If your new here, my name is Ali.
I'm a doctor working in Cambridge,
and this is the first episode
of Appy Hour and new series
where I'm gonna be reviewing apps.
Let's dive into Roam as usual,
there's gonna be timestamps here
and in the video description.
So you can skip around the
video if you feel like it.
So, firstly, what is Roam ?
Well, Roam is basically a
glorified note taking app,
on their website
they call it a tool for thought
it's an app that allegedly
helps you think better and
produce stuff more better.
That sounds really weird to say,
but it's basically a
glorified note taking app,
but it's got a few features
and a few different ways
of operating that separates it from
more traditional note taking apps
like Evernote and Notion.
With Roam, there's
basically two key features
that separate it from everything else.
The first one is that
when you open up the app,
you start off with a blank
page called the daily note
and every day you have a new daily note.
So today's July the 20th, 2020.
And so I've just got this blank screen
with a blinking cursor and a bullet point.
(keyboard clicking)
And now I can start
writing whatever I want.
It is that simple.
Like there's no official folders,
there's no structure of like notebooks
and the notes within that.
It is literally just a blank page
and you can start writing
from the blank page.
So that's feature number one
and key feature number two,
that makes Roam what it is,
is a feature called
bi-directional linking.
That's kind of hard to explain.
So I'll show you how it works.
Let's say you want to write something.
(keyboard clicking)
So I've written it,
today I read "Slave to
Sensation," by Nalini Singh.
Pretty good author, good
paranormal romance series.
The way bi-directional Lincoln
works is I can highlight
Slave to Sensation and I can
press the square bracket key.
And over there, well,
what it's done is that it's
generated square brackets
around the thing that I'm writing
and it's offered to create a page for it.
So I can click on that.
And now a separate page has
been automatically created
for the phrase Slave to Sensation equally,
I can do the same thing with Nalini Singh
I can turn her into a page.
Now this is a link now what's gonna happen
when I click on this link,
let's click on Nalini Singh,
and this is a blank page,
but you'll see over here,
we've got one link to reference
and that is a linked reference
to July the 20th, 2028,
where it says today, I
read this by Nalini Singh.
So that is what
bi-directional linking means.
It means we can go on our daily notes.
We link in one direction
to whatever page we want,
but then it also tells us the
linked references to the pages
that have linked to it.
If I that makes sense.
So between those two
features the daily note
and bi-directional linking,
that's basically the foundation
that the whole of this app
Roam Research is built on.
And there's loads of other features,
which I talk more about in my videos
on Nebula I'll tell you more about that
at the end of the video,
but essentially those
two are the key features.
And so if you're watching this now,
those two features might not
seem that groundbreaking,
but I'll show you some of my use cases
and why those two features
are like the best thing ever.
So one of my favourite
things to use Roam for
is for book notes.
So for example, if we look at the book,
"The Elephant in the Brain,"
which I can see that I
finished on June the 28th,
essentially, I've created this page for
"The Elephant in the Brain."
And for example started at June 26th,
that is a bi-directional link.
So if I SHIFT, click on that,
I can see exactly what I
was doing on June the 26th.
If I want to, then I've
written recommended by,
and I usually have this
for all my book notes
recommended by and I've
linked to Nat Eliason
He's one of my favourite bloggers.
You can check out his website
and he's actually got a course
on how to use Roam,
which I took a link in
the video description.
Anyway, I click on Nat Eliason
and I don't have any
stuff written for him.
This is a blank page,
but we can see there are
11 linked references.
So I've linked to Nat Eliason
like 11 different times.
And so there was this
article, another book,
he recommended another book.
This is an evergreen note,
more on than that later.
And a few different things that this guy,
I've referenced him in various notes
throughout the last four months.
And so at some point when I
emailed him or DM him on Twitter
and say,
"Hey, do you want to
feature in a deep dive
"on my channel or something?"
I'll have this long list of stuff
where it'll just automatically tell me
every time I've mentioned him in anything.
Going back to the book notes,
I've got my rating 10 out of 10
books cited, book "Rational Ritual,"
which I now click on.
I've said bought on July the 1st
recommended from a passage in this book,
#TBR, which means to be read.
And so if I click on TBR,
it shows all of the books that
are linked to the phrase TBR,
because you can think stuff
with the hashtag as well.
And those are all the books
that I wanna read for now.
Anyway, let's get onto the actual stuff.
So essentially what you can do in Roam
is it's a note taking app,
but you build the notes
based on these bullet points.
And so what I'm doing is
I am kind of summarising
the different chapters of the book
and hopefully trying to write
it in my own words,
along with some different quotes.
And so there's nothing
really special here.
It's just kind of a nice note taking app.
But for example,
what I can do is while
I'm writing my book notes,
I can expand stuff.
Here we go.
So common knowledge
recommendation for book,
"The Rational Rituals."
As I was writing that I
turned that into its own link.
And I filled out the details for that.
If we go down here in the
chapter about self-deception,
we've got recommendation book,
"Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite,"
SHIFT, click on that
opens up in the sidebar.
And I've added that to the
to be read list as well.
So another thing I can do while
I'm writing my book notes is
if I find something that I
wanna turn into its own page,
because it's interesting, it
becomes an evergreen note.
Then I can select something like
"The Machiavellian
Intelligence Hypothesis."
That seems like the sort of
thing that's kind of cool
that I'd wanna make a note about
to make myself remember it.
All I have to do is highlight
it, double square brackets.
It's now turned into its own page.
I can now either open the page directly
or I can SHIFT, click to
open it in the sidebar.
And then I can write my own notes
on the "Machiavellian
Intelligence Hypothesis."
And if we go on the actual page,
I can immediately see
where it's referenced.
So this is the sort of
thing that might be called
an evergreen note.
The idea is that as I'm reading the book,
I'm taking notes on the book.
I'm creating these evergreen
notes as we go along.
And so in future, if this sort
of concept becomes relevant,
maybe in like three years time,
I come across the
"Machiavellian Intelligence
Hypothesis." again,
or I think about how it
might feature in like a video
or an article or something.
I'll have this page and I'll see,
Oh, I first discovered
this way back in July, 2020
when I read
"The Elephant in the Brain,"
because this linked reference
is there automatically.
The second thing is my
workflow for evergreen notes.
So we've talked about how
we've got book notes on all of
this kind of stuff.
The second one is that
I've got this page called
Trees of Knowledge.
And within here, I'm slowly building up
my bank of evergreen notes.
So for example, within the topic of life,
we have the four important things in life.
Let's click on that.
I actually can't remember what it says.
Ah, okay.
This is interesting.
So I've tagged us with #evergreen
because I'm hoping this is
gonna be an evergreen note,
#life #hashtag #meaning #happiness
sounds a bit corny, but
those are sort of the,
it works like a simple tagging system.
So for example,
if I look at happiness,
these are the 15 linked
references to happiness
that I've got.
Oh, and I've got,
I've also used the word happiness,
like a load of times.
I just haven't explicitly linked to it.
Anyway that's not what I wanna talk about
more than that in video series of Nebula,
which I'll tell you more
about at the end of the video,
but kind of this note called
The four important things in life
is an evergreen note that
I made after listening
to this podcast episode
with Naval Ravikant and Samantha Ryan.
And so what I did while
I was listening to this
and afterwards is that I got
quotes out of the podcast.
And for each of them,
I kind of turned an interesting point
into an evergreen note.
So for example, I made one called
work is synonymous with misery,
and these are my own notes.
How do we define work?
Maybe one way is to define
it as inherently unpleasant,
something as a hobby, if it's fun
and it's work, if it's
not fun, source Naval.
And I've got a linked
link to reference to Roam,
what we're kinda getting
into the weeds here,
but that's fine.
So this quote over here,
it's not just copied and pasted
it's actually referencing
the original source.
So if I click on that,
it shows us the original source.
That is part of this podcast episode with
Naval and Samantha Ryan.
And so if I make changes to one of it,
it will automatically
update all the references
across the board.
Whereas in other note taking apps
to have that sort of feature,
you need to do a lot
of copying and pasting.
Anyway, this podcast episode
helped me generate a
lot of evergreen notes
and in my workflow series on Nebula,
I've got like a detailed tutorial
of how I make these evergreen notes,
but this is just kind of an overview.
The third use case for Roam
is that often within my daily notes,
I will do my morning pages.
Now morning pages is this kind of
creative exercise where
at the start of each day,
the idea is that you
just write three pages
of longhand as in written
by hand, continuous prose.
And that kind of helps you
get stuff off your mind.
It helps you come up with
new creative insights.
I don't like doing it on pen and paper
because my writing speed is a lot slower
than my typing speed.
And so often if I've got like
a day off work or something,
I will do morning pages
where I just kind of write
a tonne of bullet points
and through writing those,
I can create links and stuff.
I'm not gonna show you them
because I like to keep those private
because they're personal stuff
as well as business stuff,
but that's another nice
thing that I use Roam for.
And often I found that
notes that I'm making
in my morning pages actually link
to books or podcasts
that I've listened to
over the last few months.
Point number four is something
I've actually started doing
more recently, I think
over the last few weeks,
and that is using a Roam
a daily notes template.
So using the app, Alfred
I've created a snippet that
if I type in Roam daily,
it automatically creates
this sort of stuff.
Let's just get rid of those two.
So initially we've got this little thing,
your daily reminder,
don't ignore your dreams
don't work too much, say what you think.
Cultivate friendships, be happy.
I'm cringing a little bit,
but this is from a blog
post by I think Paul Graham,
where he talks about a book called
"The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,"
and the top five regrets
of people who are dying are
they wish they didn't ignore their dreams.
They wish they'd worked less.
They wished they said
more what they thought
they wish they'd kept
in touch with friends
and they wished they'd given
themselves the permission
to be happier.
And so what he's done is
he's converted that into this sort of
list of five directives,
which I now have at the top
of my, to do list each day.
So it can kind of reminds me about,
these are the five regrets of the dying
that I need to remind myself,
not to sort of lose focus on.
Anyway, the point is
this daily Roam template
gives me these six things,
create, connect, consume the other three
are a bit ropey, cerebrate,
coordinate and consolidate.
This is also a little bit cringe.
I'm sorry.
But basically the idea is that
it sort of gives me these
six categories of things
that I wanna focus on each day.
And so under Create, I might be like
filmed a roll.
(keyboard clicking)
Oh and over there, what I did is that
filmed, a roll and screen recording for,
so I've double open bracketed.
And now because I'm creating a page
I've typed in Roam
and it's telling me what
all of my different Roam pages are.
And I know that I've got a
page for this very video.
So this is video Roam intro, done.
So that is under the create thingy.
Under the Connect thing
is usually when I write notes
about people that I've spoken to that day.
And I have a little
reminder within the template
message someone I haven't
spoken to in a while.
So let's see what's on the connect list.
Let's say helped Jake
and Molly move house.
For example, sometimes I'd even have
a to do list here.
So for example,
I always like having a
mind to do this each day,
a reminder to call my grandma.
So I might write call
nanny, that's my grandma.
And if I do COMMAND + ENTER
it turns it into a, to do item.
More of that on the
Nebula workflow thingy.
'Cause there's like a whole long thing
that you can do around to do lists.
Under Consume.
I usually link to the stuff
that I've consumed that day.
So what have I done?
What have I consumed today?
So let's say on the drive to work today,
I'm listening to the book,
"War Doctor," on Audible.
So continue...
(keyboard clicking)
So you can see over here,
I've just typed in the word war
and it is telling me, well,
self awareness has won it,
but book "War Doctor," is what I want.
Continue listening to that.
Cerebrate is a bit crap
it sort of means sort of thinking,
but it's like a really
poor synonym for it.
But within that,
I usually have if I've
created any evergreen notes.
So for example,
if I was listening to that podcast with
Naval and Samantha Ryan, I might tag here.
The four important things in life,
because that would be something
that I've thought about
and something that I've created
an evergreen note about.
Coordinate is usually kind
of things on my calendar.
So for example.
Had weekly Zoom meeting
with Christian, Angus and Liz.
Who are the four members of my team.
And then I can write more about the stuff
that we did in our weekly meeting.
I was actually take notes
from that meeting in Notion,
I still use Notion for a
lot of team based stuff.
I also have a video on Nebula
and the workflow series
about Roam versus Notion.
But more than that later, sorry,
I keep on plugging that because yeah,
there's just so much
to dive into with Roam.
It's hard to talk about in one video,
but I'll definitely do more
videos about it anyway.
And then consolidate is
another really poor synonym.
Basically it means,
it reminds me to focus on my health
and like consolidate my life.
And so if I'm, for example,
doing the workout or if
I need to do a workout,
I might write workout day
becomes a to do list
with a COMMAND + ENTER.
And so for example,
I always have the app open on my laptop,
but also when I'm at
work, Roam has a web app.
You just go in Roam research.com
and it works on all the
crappy work computers
in the hospital.
And so I always kind of have this up
so that if I've got moments
of downtime during the day,
I can look at my Roam
list and I can be like,
okay, I need to call nanny,
have I got 20 minutes
to take a quick break
and call my grandma or workout day?
I can't do that at work.
But for example, I can be like,
"Oh yeah, I'm listening
to the book War Doctor."
"Why don't I add more notes
"from what I listened to this morning?"
So it just sort of
it's a very kind of cross platform way
that I can just have a
reminder of all the things
that I'm doing that day.
And it encourages me to take more notes
on the stuff that I am consuming.
Finally, I just wanna show you quickly
something I call the nibble framework.
This is based on my friend,
Tiago Forte's, "Building a
Second Brain," online course.
It's very good link in
the video description,
but basically anytime I read,
watch, listen to anything,
I target with the phrase nibble
with a worst nibble because
I kind of view every piece of content
that I consume to be
a nibble of some sort.
And all of these nibbles
are awaiting digestion.
This is again, really weird and cringe,
but it's just,
I like calling it these
weird things because I mean,
I suppose really just a content inbox,
but the phrase content
inbox sounds boring AF
therefore like the word nibble,
it just sounds more playful
and more nice anyway,
nibbles awaiting digestion.
So for example, I
listened to this podcast,
Hugh Jackman and Tim Ferris
on July the 11th finished
podcast of that, whatever.
And I've tagged it with the word nibble.
And that means using Roam
filters using this query
again more on this on Nebula.
It's now in my list of things,
nibbles awaiting digestion.
Once I have digested a nibble.
So let's look at this article.
This is one of Nat's articles.
Just a good example,
lessons from one year of
nomadic passive income
I've said #nibble, but
I've also said #digested,
which means I have gone
through the article
and I have converted the insights
into my own words and created
evergreen notes based on that.
So in the article, he
talked about this concept
of ikigai, which I thought,
"Oh, that would be a good evergreen note."
So I made an evergreen
note for it for ikigai,
and I included this thing
from Google images and stuff.
And I've got a few
references and you can see
some linked references.
So I've converted the
insights from the article
into my own notes, into
these evergreen notes.
And once I've done that
for the whole article,
it becomes #digested,
which means it no longer appears
in this nibbles awaiting
digestion category.
And this system just sort
of encourages me think,
a little bit more harder
about the stuff that I
read, watch and listen to
'cause even with a system like,
if you're familiar with my Notion set up
my resonance calendar,
I used to have my resonance calendar
and I used to add stuff to it,
but there was just no real
process to encourage me
to actually take notes about it
and actually mine the insights from it.
Whereas calling this stuff nibbles
and making them a wait digestion
to be digested and having
kind of this to do list
of things to digest means that
at any moment, for example,
if I'm at work and I've
got a spare 20 minutes,
I can look through this list and think,
Oh, you know, "Man's Search for Meaning,"
I read that the other day
on the 12th of July, 2020,
and here's some references to it.
So you can see that I
bought it on July the 2nd.
And I started listening
to it on July the 12th,
and I finished it on July the 13th.
And this is just stuff.
I mean, this is kind of nice
knowing that I bought it.
And then like 10 days later,
I started listening to it
and finished it in two days.
But it just means that
when I'm on a computer,
I have this list of default
things that I could be doing.
So it could be like,
Oh, okay, what's on my nibble list?
"Man's Search for Meaning."
Okay, cool.
Let me go through my Kindle highlights
cause I was highlighting it on Kindle
while also highlighting bits on Audible.
I can go through my Kindle
highlights and I can convert
those into evergreen notes.
And this just gives me something to do
when I have nothing better to do.
It's a good default activity.
All right, let's talk about pricing.
Now, unfortunately, Roam is not free.
It's, kind of good that it's not free
because it's really hard
to make the economies
around free apps actually work.
And I kind of prefer to pay for apps
that I'm using for a long period of time,
because I know that by paying for them
and if an app has like a paid model,
I know it's probably gonna
be around for a while.
Whereas every year there are
so many free note taking apps
that spring up.
But really only a handful of
them last the test of time.
Pricing wise, Roam costs $15 a month.
That is quite a lot.
That is one of the most
expensive subscriptions
that I pay for.
They have a 31 day free trial
that you can sign up to if you want.
And if you're a full time student
or in financial hardship
or you earn less than $25,000 a year,
or you're a teacher or
you're a researcher,
they've got this scholars
programme that you can apply to.
And with that scholars programme,
they give like half price discounts,
sometimes even full price
to whoever sort of wants it.
So more of that and the
website I'll link that
in the video description.
But yeah, it's $15 a month
and $15 a month is a lot to
pay for a note taking app.
I personally think it's
completely worth it
because to be honest,
any app that can improve my workflow
for improving my thinking
or improving my life
or improving my productivity
or helping me make more videos,
basically anything like that,
it's totally, totally,
totally gonna be worth the money.
Honestly, if Roam was $50 a month,
I'd probably still think it's worth it.
And actually, I pay a
lot more than $50 a month
for a lot of different apps
that help run this YouTube channel.
And a lot of them, I use a
lot less than I use the Roam.
I use our own literally every day.
And so $15 a month,
I think it's completely worth it
for the right sort of person.
It'll also be completely worth it.
And in fact, I don't
pay $15 a month for it
because I've actually signed up
to their believer plan,
which is $500 upfront.
But then you get Roam for five years.
So that becomes a hundred dollars a year,
which becomes like $8 a month.
But I've signed up to
the $500 believer plan
because I believe in the app so much,
I'm not being paid to say this at all.
They're not sponsoring
this video in any way
in the slightest.
I don't even think they
have an affiliate programme.
It would be nice if they did
Connor if you're watching this,
please make an affiliate
programme for Roam.
'Cause I'd love to
recommend it to more people.
But yeah, I pay $500 for the five years
total worth it.
Yeah, I get that a lot
of people watch my videos
and think, Oh bro, why do you
only talk about paid apps,
it's because I consider these
apps as like an investment
in my future and in my life.
And I would happily blow
$15 like a takeaway,
which is objectively bad for me.
Why wouldn't I spend $15
a month or $8.33 a month
via the five-year package?
Why wouldn't I spend that on an app
that improves my life
in more meaningful ways
than a single takeaway, for example?
But I get that for a lot of people,
$15 a month or $8 a month
or even $7.50 a month
on the scholars package
might not be worth it.
Finally, let's talk about some drawbacks.
And when I was drafting this video,
I was thinking, well, one of the drawbacks
is that Roam only has a web app,
but actually as of yesterday,
they've now released a sort
of desktop app and an iOS app
and an Android app.
So you can kind of use those.
They're not fully featured native apps,
this sort of progressive web applications,
if you know anything about
kind of apps and stuff.
So it's not quite the
performance of like a proper app,
but those proper apps
are under development.
It's quite a small team of
people that's running it.
And I think they're doing a great job.
The other kind of annoying
thing about Roam is that
very occasionally it takes
ages to reload the page.
Sometimes if you hit the refresh button,
you'll be waiting maybe 30
seconds for it to reload.
In the last like two months
I can think of like two or three,
times that this has happened.
It used to happen a lot
in the early days of Roam.
But I think they're
making a lot of changes
to the infrastructure and
making it a lot more performative.
So that's kinda nice.
And the final annoying thing
about it that people say is
that there's quite a bit
of a learning curve to it.
Like when you open up the app,
you're confronted with just a
blank page and you're sort of
expected to know what to
do with the blank page,
which is why courses like
my videos on Nebula or for example,
Nat Eiason's Roam course link
in the video description,
stuff like that is quite helpful.
And I personally took Nat's
course as a sort of introduction
on how to use the Roam for
these different use cases.
But the idea is that probably
you don't wanna copy exactly
what someone else is doing.
You probably wanna look at
what other people are doing,
play around with it yourself,
and then figure out if
you can sort of build Roam
into your own workflow.
If you're looking for
a more in depth guide
on how I personally use Roam
to make my life better in every way,
then you might like to check out
my workflow series on Nebula.
It's a series that I add
new videos to each month.
And it's basically where
I kind of deep dive
full nerd level style
into my favourite app.
So I've got a lot of videos about Roam,
a lot of videos about Notion,
few videos about how I consume podcasts
and how I read articles
and how I transition
those into my second brain.
And so if you're a massive nerd like me,
you might wanna check that series out.
If you haven't heard Nebula
is a streaming platform
that me and a bunch of
other creative friends
are helping to build.
It's kind of like an alternative place
where we can put content
that might not necessarily
work on YouTube.
So for example,
a long introduction or
like a series of 10 videos
on how I use Roam.
Clearly, I'm not gonna make 10 videos
on how we I Roam in a row
on YouTube because the algorithm
just wouldn't work for that.
But Nebula is a sort of place
that I can put those videos.
So on Nebula,
I've got this workflow series
along with a deep dive series
where each of the kind of
two hour long interviews
like live stream interviews,
I've done on the channel.
We chop those up into bite
size snippets of wisdom.
So each one has about like
five to 10 bite-sized segments.
So you can watch those in
kind of two to five minutes,
rather than having to sit
through a two hour live stream.
It's not just my stuff on Nebula.
There's also a lot of
exclusive content from other
educational-ish creators
that you might've heard of
like Thomas Frank, Wendover
Productions, LegalEagle.
And we also get to collaborate
in ways that might not work on YouTube.
For example, one of my favourite YouTubers
is Tom Scott has this amazing
documentary called "Money,"
where he pits a few famous YouTubers
against each other and explores
the psychology of money
and lying and gambling.
And it's so good.
To get access to Nebula.
The best way is to sign up to
CuriosityStream who are very
kindly sponsoring this video
CuriosityStream is the world's
leading documentary streaming
subscription platform.
And because curiosity stream
also love educational creators
like me and some of my friends
we've got this bundle where
if you sign up to CuriosityStream,
you get completely free access to Nebula,
not just for a short period of time,
but for as long as your
CuriosityStream subscription last,
they're currently running a
promotion where you can get
26% off the annual premium
subscription to CuriosityStream.
So for less than $15 a month,
you get access to high quality
high budget documentaries
from people like David
Attenborough and Chris Hatfield
and bundled with that
completely free of charge.
You also get all of this exclusive content
that's available on Nebula.
So if you click on the link
in the video description,
you'll get both CuriosityStream
and Nebula at 26% off,
or you can go to curiositystream.com/Ali
and use the coupon code Ali at checkout
to get the same deal.
If you like this video here is a playlist
of more app themed videos
about how I take notes using Notion
and how that compares to Roam.
Thanks for watching.
And I'll see you in the next video.
