I'm not going to go over Roam Research as a whole, there's so much on content available online about that. But I do enjoy how it just works well as a passive aggregator of thoughts, musings, and other words for thoughts and wanted to share a workflow that's feeling pretty nice.

Something that I haven't commonly seen discussed is how people are capturing ideas that go through their head throughout the day, or things learned from podcasts, audiobooks. I've found Roam on a tablet to be an easy way to capture things without context switching. There is more than just writing it down, but the spaced repetition extensions available make it easy to resurface ideas, and remember things permanently with minimal friction.

Gather:

This works so well for me since I've found that the process of trying to type up digital notes has far too much friction. Literally just pressing alt+tab while doing something can discourage me from writing notes down as frequently as I'd like to, and likely is why some people will stick to an old pencil and paper. That said it's the 21st century and using a notebook for process, organize, review, and act aspect is dated, and useless.

For my use I use the Galaxy Tab S7+, but the idea is essentially the same as below:

Additionally I use an app called wakey, so that I don't even have to deal with the hassle of unlocking my tablet (you wouldn't have to unlock a notebook every time you use it either)

Process/ Organize :

This is ridiculously easy to do in Roam with Tagging. You can simply handwrite your note. And put something like #tp, or #inbox, and set yourself a routine time to organize your notes

Review:

For me this where the magic sets in. Roam's extension support both flashcards, and random resurfacing, which allow you to start to make connection

For a more in depth discussion on the value of spaced repetition and how to get this set up, see below. But essentially by installing a single plugin and writing "#sr" after a note you can easily make a flashcard for something that you can remember for life, i.e.: Birthdays, random facts that are interesting, quotes, anything!

The other extension for this is Serendipity, this allows you to randomly resurface ideas with certain tags, or keywords. Let's say you have a fleeting thought, that you don't have time to think through now, but would like to resurface later.

Personally, I also use this for dream journals. It is incredible therapeutic to write down a dream, and have it resurface among other random thoughts that I've written throughout some day several months after I've had it.

Serendipity

Various methods of introducing randomness into your Roam Graph!

Act:

As is circled below, it's super easy to mark an item as todo in the app. Simply click the little todo button. Then you can create some queries, to appropriately organize your todos to follow action