The Busy Architect's Guide to Roam Research
A complete system for managing complex projects, endless meetings, and information overload—without losing your mind
In 2020, I woke up from a month-long induced coma with a 5% survival rate and a memory full of holes. My short-term memory was shattered. Time seemed to jump randomly. I couldn’t remember what I’d discussed in meetings or what tasks I needed to complete.
As a systems architect, I did what I do best: I built a system.
My Roam Research System
This series isn’t about productivity hacks or getting-things-done tricks. It’s about building a robust, failure-resistant system that works *with* your brain, not against it. Whether you’re managing complex projects, juggling multiple roles, or simply tired of forgetting important things, these principles will transform how you work.
Día de Muertos - or how I discovered Roam Research
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.
Where is my Ariadne?
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 and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.
A structured way of organizing Roam Research
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 and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.
It all starts NOW
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 and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.
A "Remembrall" for your meetings
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 and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.
Customizations and Themes
A robust system is worthless if you don’t want to use it. I’ve spent years refining not just *how* Roam Research works for me, but *how it looks*. The truth is that beautiful tools invite us to use them. Clean interfaces reduce cognitive load. Thoughtful typography makes information easier to process.
This collection represents my journey from “it works” to “I love working here.” It includes Craft—inspired minimalism, Tufte-style sidenotes, simplified query designs, and the complete Roam Studio plugin suite.
A Craft-like Theme for Roam Research
Hej, Here is my latest Craft-inspired theme for Roam Research. It continues the tradition of my reduced and clean user interfaces (“Less, but better”).
Roam Studio
Hej, After hundreds of hours of work, I finally published Roam Studio, a plugin for Roam Research that completely changes the user experience.
Roam Studio - Big Update
Hej, the latest update of my Roam Studio plugin for Roam Research brings a lot of new features and fixes the bugs you found during the last week.Gödel's is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Tufte Style Side Notes for Roam Research
Update 2023/11/07: Further improved the CSS to make it responsive on smaller screens and disabled when in the sidebar
Task Overview / Simple query design
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 and unique customizations (like this) will only be available to paying subscribers.
More Technical articles
When you entrust your second brain to a cloud service, you bet on security, privacy, and performance. Most users never consider what happens behind the scenes—how their data is stored, who can access it, or whether encryption works.
I’m not most users. As a systems architect, I need to *know*.
This collection represents my technical investigations into Roam Research’s infrastructure: comprehensive security analyses of end-to-end encryption, performance benchmarks with 10,000+ pages, and detailed explorations of potential vulnerabilities.
TfT Performance: Roam Research
Hej, And welcome to the Benchmark Results of Roam Research. Roam Research is considered by many to be the gold standard in tools for thought and has a large following.
E2E-Encryption for Roam Research - Part 1
Hej, And welcome to this series of articles about a recent feature Roam Research has released this weekend: end-to-end encryption. I will explore why encryption is so important, how it works, how secure it is (as far as I can judge at the moment), how you encrypt your graph, how you verify that the encryption is working, and last but not most minor, whether the encryption has an impact on performance or not.
E2E-Encryption for Roam Research - Part 2
Hej, And welcome to this series of articles about a recent feature Roam Research has released this weekend: end-to-end encryption. I have already explored why encryption is so important. Now we talk about how it works, how secure it is (as far as I can judge at the moment), how you encrypt your graph, how you verify that the encryption is working, and last but not most minor, whether the encryption has an impact on performance or not.
E2E-Encryption for Roam Research - Part 3
Hej, And welcome to this series of articles about a recent feature Roam Research has released this weekend: end-to-end encryption. I have already explored why encryption is so important and how it works, how secure it is (as far as I can judge at the moment), how you encrypt your graph and how you verify that the encryption is working. This article analyzes whether encryption impacts performance and if it does by how much.