Episode 43 of The Informed Life podcast features an interview with behavioral product strategy and gamification consultant Rob Haisfield. Rob’s area of practice is fascinating; I’d like to have a deeper discussion with him about how to design for changing behavior. However, our discussion in this episode focused on his use of Roam, “a note-taking tool for networked thought.” Rob is an early adopter, and I wanted to hear about the role Roam plays in his work.
He, too, described it as a tool:
It’s a tool for thought. What do you do with tools? You work with them, right? My job is that I think about things for a living. So, I need to track and develop my thoughts over time. I need systematic processes for myself to bring about creative insight and to consolidate all of the information I get from papers, from meetings, from lectures, all of that needs to be in one place. I will say that Roam makes it so you don’t need to do quite as much work as you would do on other apps. In fact, way, way, way less work, because the data architecture, as I mentioned before, with just knowing how blocks relate to each other, it makes writing in Roam into an extremely expressive thing. If you’re just operating intuitively under an understanding of how the data architecture works as you’re writing, then that means later you’ll be able to use queries and do a lot of this work in hindsight, pretty easily.
If you’re intrigued, check out Rob’s tour of his setup. And of course, listen to our conversation.