Roam Patrol!

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 21, 2020 at 01:05 PM

bartb wrote:
>Sascha over at Zettelkasten has a different take on backlinks
>https://zettelkasten.de/posts/backlinks-are-bad-links/

I don’t think this is valid for all implementations or use cases, certainly not for task management.

I’m finding automatic backlinking in Roam extremely useful, especially when it comes to ‘date notes’, the ones associated with a date.

E.g. if I drop a task associated with a future date (and add that as a date note, such as [[December 20th, 2020]]), to the item, when that day comes and the [[December 20th, 2020]] note is the current daily note, it will display links to all past notes (within their context) that have tasks associated with this date (e.g. something expires on this day or needs to be followed up etc.), serving as a reminder.

I often hear people on the Roam Reddit complain that Roam is not good for task management. In fact that’s the only thing I use it for and thanks to the above feature, it’s the best task manager I’ve ever used.

I realise that the manual aspect of needing to maintain a calendar may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for people like me who like to build their systems from scratch Roam is excellent for task management, and automatic backlinking is what makes it so.