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Roam Research to Explore Ideas

Ian Jones on December 19, 2019

RoamResearch.com is a tool that I have been using for the past couple weeks as a sort of daily log/research tool. It as completely changed what I e...
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Bob Walsh

Hi Ian,

Are you still using Roam and what are your thoughts now that you've been using it for a few months?

Cheers,
Bob

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Ian Jones

I have been enjoying it a lot! I've found that I use it mostly when Im trying to learn a topic or write a blog post. Which is definitely what it excels at.

My current flow is:

Article I find on the web -> Instapaper
Read/Highlight in Instapaper -> Readwise (automated)
Copy notes from highlights into Roam and progressively summarize.

Its been really nice!

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Bob Walsh

Thanks Ian - and thanks for the pointer to Readwise - just the tool I was looking for to corral my highlights in PDFs and kindle!

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Ian Jones

They have a spaced repetition feature that is nice if you download their beta app. It feeds you your highlights and you have the option to create questions out of them.

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Bob Walsh • Edited

Read the intro post for that - knowing more than a little about spaced repetition et. al. from building
LearnShortcuts, they've put together a really elegant solution.

But what I'm really liking is being able to for the first time reliably bookmark in PDFs and save those bookmarks. The process is taking the pdf, importing it into Books (formerly iBooks), then with the readwise books tool, pull your bookmarks into Readwise.

Now when I buy a pdf, I have a process for extracting what I want from that pdf, and learning the concepts I want to learn from it. Awesome! (I wrote it up, it was that good).