Día de Muertos - or how I discovered Roam Research
Día de Muertos - or how I discovered Roam Research
Using Roam Research for managing my busy life - Preface
This post is part of a series of articles explaining how I use Roam Research to manage my work, side projects, and private life. While the basic ideas will be freely available, additional background information (like this post) and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.
By 2020, I was as good as dead. My chance of survival was 5 percent. In intensive care, I was trapped between life and death for more than four weeks, only kept alive by ECMO1 and various medications.
When I finally returned to the living, many things were different. I had to learn to walk and climb stairs again. Also, regaining my ability to speak and write was difficult. I struggled with derealization and depersonalization. My short-term memory was as full of holes as a sieve, and time seemed to jump back and forth at will.
An intensive care nurse told me later that my chance of recovering and fully returning to my professional life was one in a million. Luckily I took the opportunity.
Why am I telling this story? Because that's what led me to Roam Research. In rehabilitation, I worked primarily on my physical deficits, respiratory and dizziness through physical therapy, stair climbing, and increasingly longer walks. Cognitive exercises were also part of the treatment - simple logic tasks, memory games, and math problems.
But when I returned home, I also began to work on my short-term memory and searched for support. Being a computer scientist, I naturally probed for digital helpers.
A long time ago…
I was a sloppy note-taker in my school days. It got better at university, but for lack of a laptop (unaffordable) or tablet (there was no such thing back then), most of it was simply on paper. I created digital notes on my computer at home for essential lectures, first with Word and later with LaTeX, because I needed a lot of mathematical formulas.