Bottom-up Writing

Roam and Notion are two popular tools for managing notes, each with passionate users. They couldn’t be more different.

Notion is based on top-down organization. You create a structure, and create pages in that structure. Taxonomies have to be decided in advance, and content must fit into it.

Roam is the opposite: it is a bottom-up approach to writing. The fundamental atom in Roam is the block. Blocks can be move around, reordered, composed, grouped, referenced, and turned inside-out.

This might sound like a navel-gazing note-nerd distinction, but it means that Roam is perfectly mapped to my brain while Notion is unusable.

Like one of the founders of Roam and a legion of dedicated Roam fans, I have ADHD. I view it as a superpower allowing me to think divergently & non-linearly in a world that is fond of coloring within the lines.

When I go into an ADHD hyperfocus flow state, the act of writing is a process of discovery. I don’t know the structure of what I’m going to write about until I’ve written about it. Structure emerges through listening to what the work wants to be.

That’s always how I’ve craved working, yet always been impeded by software that was designed for linear thinking.

Roam is the first software tool I’ve used that works how I think. It never constrains me, and allows me to fluidly & malleable arrange my content as form eventually emerges.