I liked Docs because it was less structured than Evernote and easy to use. But the more it grew, the more disorganized and difficult to navigate it became. I was still searching for a system that became more useful as it grew, not the other way around.

when it comes to building out a PKM system, information can be organized in one of two ways: hierarchy or network.

Hierarchies are effective for large-scale collaboration where organization is necessary for maintaining harmony between many moving parts (like the employees of a Fortune 500 company).

A network has no orientation. Each individual, or “node” in a network, functions autonomously, forming relationships with other nodes. It is inherently “bottom-up,” in that structure emerges organically without direction from an authority figure.

While popular tools, like Evernote and Notion, adopted a hierarchical approach, Roam took the networked approach, evidenced by its three core features: “bottom-up” note-taking structure, bi-directional linking, and simple interface.

Evernote is like a digital filing cabinet that can quickly become overwhelming the more you add to it.

While Notion does allow for blocks to live in multiple places at once, its use of templates for structuring information makes it more useful as a tool for collaboration rather than a tool for connecting ideas.

Roam’s lack of structure allows you to organically create a giant knowledge web of ideas from the bottom-up.

The more information you add to it, the more powerful it becomes as the connections grow stronger around your most important ideas.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something."

“Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is shrinking."

If your PKM system were a living organism, then the bullet point would represent your organism’s fundamental building block—the atom. Everything builds on top of it, and while it is not particularly unique on its own, the connections you make between them is what makes your system truly unique.

Tags are reserved for the Metadata section and are used to link a page to general concepts and themes I’m interested in exploring, whether right now or in the future.

Unlike other tools where I have to search for ideas inside folders and templates, Roam showcases your most important ideas as the largest nodes on the Graph Overview.

Roam is like my idea garden where I plant a lot of idea seeds then wait patiently to pick out the ones that really start to blossom.

Once I have a working outline, I’ll switch over to Google Docs to write the actual draft. I still prefer using Google Docs for writing my drafts since I find the bullet point structure of Roam disruptive for the creative flow of long-form writing.