Hello and welcome fellow Roamans,
​
I’ve cherry-picked a few of the most interesting things happening in the RoamCult at the moment, and introduce a new section of the letter, where I shine a spotlight on a Roaman who deserves to be more well-known.

Around the Roaman Empire

Daily Agenda

Abhay Prasanna and Shawn Murphy have been busy. Not content with the Vanilla Masonry theme I covered in Letter XII, they have cooked up a brilliant way to create a Daily Agenda in Roam that mimics other software like NotePlan or “old school” analogue paper planners.

This is just the first step, which turns the kanban board into a daily schedule visually. Shawn is working on some enhancements using Roam42 SmartBlocks to make it possible to send blocks to specific times and days on future schedules.

I have been using it the last week or so, and it works amazingly well. I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops further.

​You can grab the CSS to add to your own Roam, along with full instructions here.​

Explode your productivity

​A fun bit of javascript you can add which spices up your TODOs by causing them to explode when you tick them off!

Roam Games

Conor White-Sullivan announced the results of the second round of Roam Games.

The first-place winners were Robert Haisfield and Dhrumil Shah with their innovative ideas for improving the onboarding experience for new users.

One byproduct of their submission was Azlen Elza’s piece of javascript that visually shows you how your blocks are nested, highlighting all the page references in the tree to help you learn the importance of indentation and outlining.

I highly recommend adding this to your graph if you want to get better at outlining with Roam.

​Samuel, Olli and Kifah were awarded second place for Roam Glowup, a series of UX revamps and ideas for a never-ending learning journey.

And in third place, Bruno Godefroy, who built roamsanity.com which aggregates sources of Roam information into a simple search engine

100 Roam Tips

This is a great video by Marc Koenig where he showcases a ton of tips and use-cases for using Roam well. He has timestamped all 100 tips so you can jump straight to any one of them for a quick refresher. (I’ve included the timestamps and tips in the JSON for this letter)

Roam Summit

​Jason Griffing is creating a new experience to bring the brightest minds in the Roam community together to share, discuss, and debate best practices and methodologies. The aim is to foster connection and promote the free flow of ideas amongst the Roam Community through events such as live-streamed panels, 1-on-1 interviews, and small group sessions. Here he explains more:

Unlike traditional summits, which only occur once a year, the Roam Summit never stops. Instead, we will conduct events all year long; call it a “rolling summit.” The content calendar will anchor around at least one major event every month. These anchoring events will include panels, presentations, and Q&A sessions with thought leaders from the community.

Outside of these monthly anchoring events, the Roam Summit will produce smaller “Summit Sessions”, which will feature expert interviews, live learning sessions, small group discussions, and more.

This approach is a fresh take to the idea of summits. Much like Roam itself allows us to start with small, atomic ideas and build them over time into rich, interconnected networks of thought, the rolling summit model takes this same “low floor, high ceiling” approach to fostering connection in the community. This approach will also allow more flexibility for scheduling events and different times that work in time zones across the globe.

Eventually the plan is to create an annual in-person event. Dedicated whole-day/multi-day events can be very powerful when executed correctly. Our initial lean and iterative approach to the Roam Summit will allow us to gather the feedback needed in order to shape the most effective annual summit possible.

The first Roam Summit will kick off this Saturday, February 27th, 2021 at 11:00 am ET with the first live-streamed panel. Joining Jason Griffing on the call will be Robert Haisfield, Joel Chan, and Kyle Stratis. The conversation will cover methodologies related to the use of page and block references designed to help maximize discoverability, efficiently link ideas, and discover the surprising connections in your graph that generate truly creative insights.

Other sessions are already in the works, I jumped on a call with Jason and Tracy Winchell to brainstorm ideas for a Journaling themed summit, hopefully sometime in March.

​roamsummit.com has all the information you need, including the live event link, and how to stay up to date with everything plus how to get in touch if you’re interested in contributing to a future event.

Roaman Spotlight

For the inaugural Roaman Spotlight, I’m extremely pleased to introduce Mark McElroy. He was nominated to me by multiple people for several reasons but notably his conversation with Tracy Winchell about journaling in Roam clearly touched people deeply.

I came across Mark via Tracy, learned more through his article about Algorithms of Thought and have begun to know his intelligence and kindhearted nature firsthand through Roam Book Club 3.

I will apologise now for the length of this email. For this feature, I’m asking all Roaman’s to answer the same questions. I originally planned to abbreviate and condense the answers into shorter pieces and include the full length in the JSON export, however, I simply could not do justice to Mark’s answers so here they are in full. I am sure you’ll agree why more people need to get to know him.

What do you use Roam for?

While I’m fascinated with Roam’s power user applications, most of my daily use consists of little applications that yield big impacts over time.

Every morning, my Roaman Journal is the first thing I touch. I start by completing notes on the previous day and start the current day’s entry using a Roam42 template. A long time ago, I identified three life-improvement metrics (mindful eating, meditation, and exercise), so my daily template includes a Y/N tracker for each of these, along with a spot to log weight. Beyond this, journal entries include brief notes on the events of the day (prompted by short questions like “What’s on your mind? What happened? What did you notice?)” and the occasional photo.

Every day also gets a daily score: a single number from one to ten, where one would be “a really crappy day” and ten would be a candidate for “best day of my life.” A simple query in Roam helps me convert this data into useful insights. I’ve noticed, for example, that on days when I’m making time to eat mindfully, meditate, and exercise, my average daily score is a 7; on days when compliance is low, my average score drops to 5.8! It’s not a stretch to say I’m using Roam to improve my life, because noticing trends like these can help you unlock the potential of small actions taken consistently over time.

Every meeting? Noted and logged in Roam. Blog posts and video scripts? Drafted in Roam. Short stories? Written in Roam.

And finally, inspired by Matt Brockwell (@jeanvaljean689), I’ve been having conversations with my graph through searches on what he calls “semantic gold mines” — short phrases like “could have” or “might be.” In one case, I searched on the phrase “I want” — and the unlinked references that appeared taught me soul-shaking insights into the power of desire and the poison of regret.

What has Roam taught you?

Roam has given me a new appreciation for the power of community. About the time COVID forced a degree of isolation on most of us, we moved from a very large city to a very small town. This combination of events left me feeling adrift; for the first time in years, I didn’t have daily interactions with a community of life-long learners and fellow creatives.

In the same way Roam links ideas together, Roam links people together, connecting me with an amazing community of smart, generous folks. Without exception, the people I’ve reached out to — like the amazing Tracy Winchell (@traceyplaces), to cite just one example — have been happy to share what they know, introduce me to others, and draw me into their conversations.

Through the roamcult, Twitter, and the Roam Book Club, I’ve been connected with people like Matt Brockwell, Beau Haan, Kate Foy, and so many others, including you, too, Andy. The affection I feel for you people is a real and powerful force in my life; I’m grateful to Roam every day for linking us together.

What attracted you to Roam?

There’s nothing like aging to remind you that time is precious. Back in July, as I approached my 56th birthday, I began to feel a frustration with my tendency to be more of a dabbler than a do-er. I have many broad interests, but I realize I’m engaging with them in shallow ways. It seemed to me that, after decades of reading and taking notes and acquiring so much technology, I should feel more deeply connected with my passions … and be more productive.

So I went looking for a tool that might help me achieve that. Notion has been a powerful tool for so many people, but it struck me as one of those tools that requires a lot of time to structure (and that the penalties for not quite getting that structure right from the start would get increasingly more devastating as time went on).

Videos often compared Notion to Obsidian and a mysterious new app called Roam Research, so I took a look at these. I loved the spirit of the Obsidian effort and liked the local storage and offline capabilities. Also — who doesn’t love a freebie? But in the end, Obsidian’s mode-switching (Obsidian requires you to toggle between different views for editing and reading) and the predominant focus on page-level references made it my second choice.

By contrast, Roam is so elegant! The structure you need emerges over time. Every day starts with an invitation to create — that fresh, clean Daily Page. Writing, reading, editing, and connecting all take place in the same context. Every single block is a jumping off point to new discoveries. And for the long term, a well-funded tool is far more likely to be viable in times to come.

These factors, along with remarkable first experiences and a quick increase in personal productivity, made me fall in love with Roam. And if you’re looking for a tool that rewards deeper study, it’s hard to imagine one with more potential for payoff than Roam.

What’s your favourite feature of Roam?

Linked references are cool, but my favorite feature by far is part of Roam’s core functionality: unlinked references. Unlinked references keep stored information from slinking off into oblivion. Through those unlinked references, Roam continually connects your interests in the moment with the resources you’ve gathered over time. Especially when you have decades of journal entries and Kindle highlights, Roam’s ability to tie today’s project with yesterday’s insights makes it into a remarkably powerful engine for boosting creative output.

What do you hope to see in the future?

I believe Roam has great potential as a collaborative creative writing partner. I’ve created a simple template that summons random blocks from my graph and drops them into a dramatic structure: The Everyday World, The Inciting Incident, The Rising Complication, The Climax, Resolution. I’ve used this little application to write fiction, like the short story, “Bloom” published over on MarkMcElroy.com.

Along these lines, I hope to see Roam adopted by more creative writers and storytellers — not just as a medium for creation, but also for collaboration and publishing. I’m especially excited by the Roam’s multiplayer potential (which we’re exploring very thoroughly in the Roam Book Club) as it might be used by authors and readers.

What if a novel could emerge as a result of the interplay between a team of writers … and be shaped by real-time feedback from passionate readers? How might links and unlinked references be used to create a new, non-linear kind of novel — a set of experiences the reader could expand or explore based on his or her own interests? Can a sense of story survive the loss of linearity?

With this in mind, I’m eager to see multiplayer mode mature, along with the addition of more granular and flexible sharing and publishing options.

Tell us one interesting thing about you

My proudest achievement is my 29-year marriage to my husband, Clyde. My Roaman Journal entries have helped me see even more clearly what a huge role he plays in my pursuit of my life improvement goals … and how fortunate I am, given where I started, to have him him by my side on this remarkable journey. He’s my North Star … and whenever we’re together, I’m home.

To learn more about Mark, visit his site www.markmcelroy.com, or connect with him on Twitter or Instagram.

And, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that he's produced 3 pilot episodes of a video series for beginner Roam users, which he's looking for feedback on. 60 Seconds To Roam.

Thinking Out Loud

In Letter XII I asked about the less obvious uses of Roam or if you used it in interesting ways. Amongst other replies, there were several surrounding using Roam for fiction writing. Mark’s answers above couldn’t be more serendipitous if I tried.

​Lisa-Marie Cabrelli contacted me to tell me about how she has been using Roam for her Ph.D. project, and how it has replaced the need for many other writing tools. I jumped on a Zoom call last week, for a Roam tour of her rBook for the book she wrote as part of the project, The Descent. We spent a fascinating hour talking about the world of writing fiction. I learned many new terms, for example, whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter. Lisa is a Plotter, while Stephen King is a Pantser

Her thesis centres on exploring ideas around collaborative authorship. The Roam graph serves as a gateway to the world the novel is set in, you can find more of the backstory on the characters, and the story world of “Great America”. The aim is to let go of the authorship and allow others to expand the world, enriching the world and characters in a variety of ways, including building on, collaborating and writing your own stories within the same world.

You can download the novel for free, and then get access to the Roam graph if this interests you.

One thing which really came across during our call was Lisa’s strong systems thinking mindset. We chatted about how important it is to have and create processes that ensure you get the results you want. It’s not enough to simply dump stuff into Roam and magically hope that you can get things out later.

And just yesterday, she published a video showing how to build processes with Roam. It’s well worth a watch!

I'm still on the look-out for members of our community who are doing stellar work, and who should be more well-known. Reply and tell me who they are so I can reach out and hopefully feature them in a future issue.

As ever, I've included my Roam JSON "Directors Cut". It contains a lot of extra information this time around.

Thanks for reading,

Andy

​Letter XIII.zip​