That’s how I’m feeling about Roam, having used it daily for the past week. Long story short - a well-designed app that’s a pleasure to use is important, not because of the app itself, but because it makes doing the work more fun. When I switched my personal website to Ghost, the experience of writing blog posts became a joy, and so I did more of it.Įqually, when I started using Notion in 2019, the experience of project and life management in the app was so joyful that it made me want to do it more. It was (and is) such a beautiful writing experience on Mac, iPhone and iPad that it encouraged me to write so much more than I did on Evernote which felt bloated and awful (although in fairness, Evernote seems to be improving as well these days).īack when I was managing websites run on Wordpress, I used to hate writing blog posts because the experience of the Wordpress editor was awful. I noticed this when I first started using Bear.

They’re important because sometimes finding the right app encourages us to actually do the work.

It’s so easy to think that this one new app is going to solve all our problems, when in reality, we need to be more disciplined to actually do the work, rather than thinking that an app is going to magically do it for us. I think this is an important insight - having been into this productivity stuff for over a decade now, I’ve realised first-hand that our workflow is infinitely more important than the apps we’re using.

I’d tried it out a couple of times but the learning curve seemed annoying, and I recognised that the bottleneck in my personal knowledge management systems wasn’t the choice of app, but instead making the time to actually take notes and write properly.

Roam is a hot new note-taking app that I first heard about in late 2019. I want to share an app that I've been experimenting with this week - Roam Research.

Notion vs evernote vs roam