Hello fellow Roamans,

This is shipping out a little later than usual because my Thinking Out Loud section is really hot off the press since I decided to change direction at the last minute (for reasons that may become more apparent as you read it) and as such they are particularly raw and unfiltered as they don’t have the benefit of my multiple draft stages which I usually practice in favour of earlier feedback.

Around the Roaman Empire

Pay attention

​Fabrice Gallet has made another huge update to his popular SmartBlocks timestamp buttons. Now you can add categories and subcategories and total up the time for them. This is a great way to be more intentional with your time and attention.

Grab or update it from the RoamJS SmartBlocks store.

For one night only

​Vlad Sitalo has released a neat little widget which makes dealing with dates in Roam on mobile much easier. You can quickly adjust dates in blocks, and also supports the Roam Toolkit SRS system for reviewing the blocks again in the future.

​More details and code to install into your graph can be found on Github.

Clean Vintage

​Joseph Wood has released a really nice looking theme called “Clean Vintage”.

​All the details you need to install it along with some nice background are on Joseph's site.

Alfred you complete me

PhonetoRoam have added some autocompletion abilities to their Alfred workflows which is similar to what their new ioS Helpful Keyboard does. For more information and instructions on how to install it, check out the changelog.

Bespoke Roam

​Norman Chella aka RoamFM has released a series of videos in which he talks about some of the meta principles for building your own note-taking system.

Roam Love

A cool new video from newcomer to the Roam scene, Laila Faisal. I really liked this first one where she dives into her workflows around journaling and planning and review - all right up my alley! And imagine, if this is the quality of her first video I can’t wait to see what else she produces in the future.

Of Course there is

As I reported in Letter XXIX, Maarten van Doorn has now released his Academic Mastery in Roam course and is well-priced. His announcement video gives a good overview of the topics he covers.

Learn more and sign up at https://www.academicmasterywithroam.com/​

For an alternative take, Jason Griffing, host of Roam Sessions is also in the process of creating a course called Vanilla Roam.

Jason is looking for feedback so while the course is in beta, it’s free!

​Find out more at https://jasongriffing.podia.com/vanilla-roam-beta​

Quick Roam Tip

Roam is full of hidden gems—I was reminded the other day that Roam added support for MermaidJS diagrams around a year or so ago, but it’s pretty hidden (which is why I forgot about it). It provides another native drawing tool like and , and is particularly useful if you have a need for showing visualisations like flowcharts, pie charts or gantt charts. It also supports a number of diagrams useful to software developers like ERD, class, state and sequence diagrams.

To create one, type in the following code

Then nest below it the relevant markdown-like definitions to render it visually. When you add the code, it’ll show you the instructions and a few examples to get you started. For all the gory details, and more examples check out the documentation.

Thinking Out Loud

In the Roam Book Club live session this past weekend, we had the pleasure of author David Epstein’s company as we have been syntopically reading his book, Range and Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You in order to try to answer our own questions.

As both books touch on the well-known concept of Deliberate Practice there were two questions that I wanted to try and find some answers to as part of my wider personal learning journey as well as a way to cultivate and encourage growth for employees in my business.

1. Is deliberate practice possible to do in knowledge work, or is it confined to only kind learning environments?
2. How can we apply deliberate practice and encourage and support employees in doing so to further their skills and growth?

​

During the course of the Q&A session, David shared that he had engaged Anders Ericsson in productive debates on the subject several times.

(As a slight aside he also shared that he created his newsletter as one way to share early thoughts about things that he was learning and improving his skills in new and unfamiliar territory. That was particularly resonant as I created this newsletter for similar reasons.)

In the subsequent breakout room we had on the topic, I began coalescing toward the brief conclusion that Deliberate Practice as defined in the literature isn’t really possible in wicked environments (i.e. domains where knowledge work is typically performed) but we can approximate it to a degree which is likely to be a useful practice worth pursuing.

What does all this have to do with Roam and tools for thought you might ask? (Aside from the relation to Roam Book Club)

As we discussed it, I realised that I could use a combination of the ultraworking technique and my regular weekly, monthly and quarterly review processes to do “deliberate style practice” and keep track of my progress over time in Roam.

(I’m heading towards adopting a term like purposeful or intentional practice instead of deliberate practice to disambiguate it from the more well-known and distinct term)

I’m yet to implement this as a practice but I think it’s a good example of how the composability of Roam and the natural structure that the blocks, page references and outlining affords via the 5 fundamentals of Roam make this easy.

Here's what a sample ultraworking session looks like for me.

This structure could be modified to reflect specific learning journeys as the top-level parent blocks, optionally linked to a clear structured set of practices of increasing difficulty.

Questions could be tailored to set out the objectives of the practice sessions and what to be explicitly focused on practicing.

Practice cycles can be done in pomodoro-like increments, with a section for specific immediate feedback, again potentially fueled by questions to cause active reflection on the activity.

Of course, all of this is done on the daily note pages and time-stamped.

Combine this with Fabrice’s updated timeblock buttons and categorisation mentioned earlier, and you get an easy way to log and total your practice hours.

Then in the same vein as my recurring reviews:

This could be amended to get feedback at the weekly level, using queries to pull back previous sessions from the past week for reviewing progress and making further adjustments to the overall practice program.

I do similar style reviews at monthly and quarterly intervals, querying for these weekly reviews over the course of a month, and then quarter. This can help to ensure that you’re continuing to keep the challenge of the practice high enough.

On the call, and in the original podcast that David did with Cal Newport, (which prompted Maggie Delano to run this book club itself) he outlined a set of questions to ask yourself every month or so, to adjust and fine-tune your practices or decide when to switch gear.

Anyway, this really is a fresh braindump of my recent thoughts and is particularly unpolished right now, however as we discussed in the breakout room, a key component is finding ways to solicit fast feedback.

So consider this to be an open invitation for feedback. I welcome any kind of feedback, good or bad, but I would especially like any feedback or thoughts on my deliberate practice musings or at the larger scale ways I could continue to improve my writing to be more compelling and engaging.

Hit reply and send me an email.

Until next time,

Andy

P.S. As ever I must say a huge thank you to my lovely supporters Sam, Josef, Habib, and Pierre who all generously bought me coffees last time. I really appreciate your support. 💕

I also offer a few private 1-1 Roam coaching sessions if you're looking for some help and guidance with your setup. If you enjoy these letters and would like to help contribute to the running costs or book a coaching call, you can do so through Buy Me a Coffee.

​