![]() Obsidian has the same sort of friction that forces curation that something like The Archive has. When I tried using Obsidian like I was using Roam, it was not pleasant. You can easily use Obsidian like a normal ZK. It does have some proprietary syntax you can take advantage of, but it in no means forces you to use that syntax, nor is that syntax so useful that you'll feel like you're missing out by avoiding it. Obsidian takes markdown notes in plaintext. I wish that I had that trust, because I really really love working with Roam, but for now I'll stick with plaintext.Īs an aside, I didn't touch on Obsidian here because I don't think that Obsidian belongs in the list with Roam and Logseq. I know that many people trust that Roam will be around for a long time, or that the benefit they're getting from Roam is worth the risk of losing their notes, or that other tools with definitely be developed to read their notes-backups if Roam ever shuts down. Until I feel like I can reasonably expect to be able to store a local copy of my notes, and be able to interact with those notes in perpetuity, I can't comfortably trust my notes to Roam. This is ultimately what pushed me to leave Roam. Maybe it's easier now with Logseq, but the nested hierarchy of the outline structure makes it hard to convert your notes into plaintext while retaining the context implied by the hierarchy, not to mention that the block-level linking only works so long as you have a program that can read Roam's internal structure. That said, Roam is very hard to get your notes back out of. With ZK, taking notes is a different mental state that I have to put myself into. ![]() It was an application that I never closed and was always adding to. ![]() Do you find it more valuable to be constantly collecting and interacting with knowledge, or do you find it more valuable to carefully build your notes? With Roam, I felt immersed in my notes. This isn't necessarily good, nor is it necessarily bad. With Roam, you can capture anything that catches your eye. With ZK, you have to curate the information that you take down. I think that it is an approach to dealing with and trying to tame the firehose of information that we're confronted with in the information age. It does allow you to more quickly collect information, though. It isn't a filing cabinet like Evernote, and the linking ensures that you will come across that information again, so I don't think that it strays too far into the collector's fallacy. It has some aspects of ZK, but it also removes the friction enough that you can more effortlessly capture any stray thought or bit of information you come across. It gives you a place to put all of your thoughts and connect those thoughts. In this way, I think that Roam (and I guess Logseq, which I haven't used) is the flipside approach to ZK. ![]() I really enjoyed the frictionless writing and linking. It was too easy to put my thoughts down, too easy to connect to any little bit of previous text. Roam never gave me a flow state, and I think what was was missing was the friction. I find that working in my ZK can push me towards a flow state. The time it takes to do this, while not excessive, is enough to push you towards curating the notes you take. In ZK, you are deliberate with the contents of your note, you think about what context you want to find the note in, and you have to deliberately place links to other notes and contexts. I definitely wrote more when I was using Roam. Roam makes it very easy to put all of your notes and thoughts down in a tangled web of connections. It didn't take long before I was linking between blocks, linking topic words without writing notes in that topic's page, nesting information into all sorts of branched hierarchies without splitting it up into atomic components, etc. That said, I think you would have to be very disciplined to use a tool like Roam and not take advantage of its features. If you make your own connections instead of letting the software do it, I don't think that there is any difference between using Roam and using something in plaintext, other than the difficulty of getting your notes out of Roam. I really enjoyed my time with it, but I ended up returning to a more zettelkasten approach in plain text. I used Roam for 3 months, putting 100,000+ words into it.
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