Day 4 - My Note Taking Journey

From Evernote through Roam Research to Obsidian

In college, I was an avid Evernote user. I would gather quotes, lists, musings, and startup ideas through one tap on my home screen. Then I stumbled on Roam Research and became an early adopter. The founder Connor personally onboarded me and sold me on the vision. He identified the problem with existing note-taking systems like Evernote as being great for capture, but bad for creation and usage. The problem with folders and tags is you need to understand the structure of usage before you need it.

Roam Research allowed better tools for actually using your notes and mixing notes including the automatic creation of a knowledge graph. You could create a page for education and it would automatically link to every other time you mention the word. You could pull quotes from different notes and have the quote directly reference the source.

The dream became collecting notes over time and eventually collecting enough key insights that writing an article or collecting your thoughts on an idea would already have all the resources you need readily accessible. To directly cite sources, you could copy-paste an entire article and then pull referenced quotes elsewhere.

I transferred over the bulk of my book notes and did research for my startup in Roam. But transferring all my notes over was so tedious with the different formatting, I never fully finished. I need a better system of organization.

That’s where PARA and Building a Second Brain came in. PARA offers a system of organization where you mostly use a Projects folder that directly relates to something you are currently working on.

Obsidian added the ability to use raw markdown which made transferability easier. But, ultimately the dream was not realized. Organizing information and writing is still incredibly difficult. I find the hassle of organization still difficult and most of my knowledge is still unorganized and unused.