The Complete Guide to Effective Note-Making in Roam Research

How to craft your Zettlekasten of atomic notes, actually master books and write essays

I see many people taking notes in an ineffective way.

If you collect information by highlighting and importing, copying interesting source material into your graph, putting [[]] around concepts, and tagging each page and block, this article is for you. (If this doesn’t mean a lot to you, check out https://roambrain.com/ for Roam Research 101.)

Because just (progressively) summarizing and tagging blocks — the method the vast majority of people use — renders most of what we read ineffectual. If this is all you do, you’ll forget most of what you’ve read and you’ll hardly be able to use this material in your writing.

Figure 1. Notetaking through highlighting (Credit: Kyle Harrison)

Yes, even if you’ve already figured out the more efficient (but still in effective) route via Readwise, where you don’t copy things into your graph but highlight what you find interesting and it automatically syncs to your graph; it’s still a bad way to learn. Especially if you add tags to the pages of your articles, books, and papers and their blocks and think, since this means you’ll be able to find them later, you are now…