@joncarllewis wrote something which got me diving deeper into my own musings the past few weeks since the new year started. He talked about how journaling daily can be used as a tool for growth, as accumulating data over the years to find solutions to problems now.

This is the exact reason why I write everyday too - as a tool for introspection and self growth. I wrote on and off, in seasons when I was younger, but I found all those words penned on paper harder to synthesize, find patterns and play around with, unlike with digital data. With digital, words become data points, sentences becomes nodes, posts become patterns. 

The past 400+ days of writing daily here had provided some form of quantified data for my mind and life, and thanks to search, hashtags and backlinks, finding recurring themes that I kept going back to, topics and things that I’m passionate about, had all been easier. 

But something still feels…lacking.

I desire for the best writing tool not just for post-hoc analysis but also realtime sense-making, for emergent synthesis of thoughts, ideas and beliefs. I have a good idea or vision of what my dream journaling platform would look like.  It’s a far-out and crazy idea of a product, but it speaks about what I feel I need for my purposes. But there’s nothing out there like it. Lately, I’d been experimenting with RoamResearch as a note-taking/journaling tool, and so far it had been impressive. Bi-directional links had been a game-changer, and each bi-directional link has an auto-generated page that contains all the other instances where you mentioned that word or linked it. This becomes a node in a graph overview where different topics are visualised and shown how they connect together. So now I can not just collate all the various moments when I mentioned a topic, but it even points out other connected topics as well. There’s still a deep ocean of features that I had yet to try, but Anne-Laure of Nesslabs describes it best as a “tool for metacognition, for networked thought”. I couldn’t agree more. It’s great for synthesis of recurring themes and patterns, and finding tangential connections to other themes.

Being able to use data that you track on a regular basis to make certain inferences or discover emergent themes about yourself is the whole point behind the quantified self movement, and so far Roam seems to live up to that in some innovative ways compared to conventional note-taking/journaling tools. 

I’d not yet felt the need to transition to another platform for my daily writing, but with Roam and the possibilities it showed, I can feel some early tremors in my perspective. Perhaps I can use both 200wad and Roam in parallel—former for the community, the latter for the data. As I progress in my life goals, how I see and use writing as a tool to supercharge my goals will continue to evolve. It will be interesting to see this theme unfold in this new year!