(This article was first published on Alex Kontis’ Medium page.)

 

 

Until late last year, I’d been a Bullet Journal user for a little over three years. My Baron Fig Confidant had become an indispensable tool for keeping me focused on work and reducing distractions by being a concrete place to externalise thoughts.

That all went out the window with the birth of my son and I quickly found that I was no longer able to spend the time or summon the energy to write everything down by hand, even if I’d somehow remembered to keep my notebook close by.

Instead, I had to devise a new system that relied on digital tools for their convenience and speed, ideally by recreating the best parts of the Bullet Journal method which had been working so well for me.

Enter Roam Research.

I’d been using Roam since the beginning of 2020, and it’s a remarkable service with the standout feature being the bidirectional linking of pages. Write something on one page and wrap it in double brackets [[like so]] and that itself becomes a page with the original text showing up on the new page as a linked reference.

Confused? Let me show you how to recreate a Bullet Journal in Roam.

 

Setting up the Bullet Journal structure in Roam

A very important date

Using Roam as your digital Bullet Journal

For Bullet Journal-ers, one you’re likely to use a lot is TODO, for obvious reasons.

Migration in Roam

Collections in Roam

Round Up