I struggle to organise my daily life (ADHD diagnosis), and I am consequently always on the lookout for new productivity tools. The latest generation of PKM’s, pioneered by Roam Research, are absolutely amazing in their ability to combine project and task management, networked thinking, spaced repetition, brainstorming, document creation - you name it! I started with Roam, and though I really liked it was put off by the high fees, and lack of ownership over data. Then I moved to Obsidian which is great because it has a really vibrant community of developers, and is also free. However, I found its emphasis on note-level as opposed to block-level organisation a bit limiting. I saw logseq on the Obsidian discussion board an am now giving it a try. My first impression is that it is incredibly powerful, and successfully implements all the key features of Roam without data lock-in and high fees. In addition I love the adoption of Org-mode features which Roam lacks (e.g. setting deadlines for tasks and sorting by deadline, which I recollect, is not that straightforward in Roam). Obviously it still lacks many of the features of Roam and Obsidian, but the fundamentals are absolutely there.
Hi Nick,
Thank you very much for trying Logseq out and for posting a little bit about yourself. It is great to know where the users are coming from and the positives and negatives they have with LS. Any comments only help to improve the app.
I am like you, I joined RR, but as it was non-local and stored on someone else’s server, I was put off immediately. Many people say Google / Microsoft has access to everything about you, so what difference does it make. Not sure what it is but I have a lot more faith in Google and MS safely storing my data vs others. The comment about RR team members “will not read your notes” was a bit of a red flag to me.
I also went down the Obsidian route first and although I think it is an exceptional tool, it did not click for me. It might be because of the lack of a WYSIWG type interface or lack of outline (at the time) but Logseq just felt right.
What are some of the features of RR and Obsidian that you crave to see in LS?
Great to have you onboard, if you have any questions or comments just shout.
Hi Ed. Good to meet you. Sounds like we’ve come from a very similar place. A few Obsidian features/plugins I really like are
- Spaced repetition with Remnote style syntax. It’s brilliant for creating flashcards to learn things
- Natural Language Dates. Just type a date and press a shortcut key, and the date is rendered accurately in a YYYY-MM-DD format (or whichever format you choose). I prefer this method to having a pop up calendar, but the two can also be combined interactively (see excellent Fantastical calendar for Mac)
- A “command palette”. This is very similar to the forward slash trigger, but it has a much bigger search box (placed centrally), and uses fuzzy matching to rank hits. This would be useful if the plugin ecosystem were to take off, bringing in a wealth of new commands / functions which might be overwhelming if accessed via the forward slash trigger.
I dabbled in Roam a while ago, and can’t recall many Roam features from then which are not replicated in Obsidian. I do recall being impressed by the Roam implementation of Tables, and Kanban.