Tracking Themes in Notes

If you don’t focus on an area of your life over an extended period, nothing ever really changes, does it? I have had ideas here and there, but often haven’t made them real themes running through my life. Things I am trying every day and iterating on. So it amounts to nothing. A fleeting idea doesn’t change anything.

With a notetaking tool like Roam, you might actually be able to see how themes thread themselves through your life. Roam isa notetaking app that emphasizes tagging key concepts in your writing, which automatically generates lists of references to certain concepts.

So, if you pulled up your automatically generated Relationships page, you could see that you were thinking a lot about relationships in the fall. That you made a note referencing Relationships almost every day in the fall. But it doesn’t seem very easy to do that, really. You have to have the idea to go look at the page to see how often you mentioned the thing.

It would be interesting to see something subtly pop up like “You mentioned Relationships 50 times in September, but you’ve mentioned them only 5 times in October.” Generally, seeing the number of mentions of things over time would be interesting. Like in the summer you were thinking a lot about swimming and happiness, but in the winter you were thinking about being cold and unhappy. Or it might be something surprising. You might discover surprising correlations that you could actually make use of.

Imagine an Insights page, listing trends and correlations. And making it easy to graph them over time. It might not turn out to be useful. But it would be interesting.