Task Management in Knowledge Outliners

Posted by Luhmann
May 4, 2021 at 01:03 AM

So one of the things that both Roam and Obsidian do well (although I am more familiar with Roam) is allow you to filter your backlinks. So, if you have a bunch of meetings with [[Joan Smith]] and half of them are about [[project 1]] and half are about [[project 2]] you can filter (or filter out) the project you want (or don’t want) to see. You can also create custom queries which will generate a list of hits based on search results (such as all blocks which have a certain word, even if it isn’t tagged). You can also generate queries based on date ranges. And there are some third party tools, like Roam42 that let you do even more in terms of pulling this information. But the more you tag the less issue there is with finding stuff, especially when used with filtering.

Regarding performance, Roam currently is slow when handling large numbers. I currently have over a thousand completed tasks (automatically marked [[DONE]] when you check them off). I tried looking at these recently and discovered that it can take over a minute to generate the list of backlinks. However, once generated filtering and manipulating them is fast. Roam Research is working on a new backend that will supposedly be much more efficient. My understanding is that it is already working, but that they haven’t implemented it because of issues with how to transition anyone without causing any disruptions or data loss. Hopefully it will be out later this year.