Become a Keyboard Maestro With Roam Research (ft. Beau Haan and Ramses Oudt)

keyboard maestro all right that's the first thing they're gonna see hello hello everyone welcome everyone um it looks like we're with 20 people at the moment so thank you for for watching live my name is ramses i'm together with bohan uh we are two row nerds so if you're not familiar with uh either of uh us we hope to to teach you a thing or two actually beau is probably going to teach you a thing or two i am being the student today um and yeah we're doing this under the the roamstack umbrella and why is that because we just want to promote good tools that will help you to save time that will help you to make your life easier and starting from rome as a tool for knowledge work and thinking i would say um it's really is a a great starting point to start thinking about okay what else is possible so today we're going to look at keyboard maestro with no affiliation with keyboard maestro actually bo told me about it a few weeks ago and i started to check it out it's like holy this is really cool so um yeah we'll be having a look at the chat and i am going to facilitate the session while beau is just going to show some awesomeness i would say so um if you have any questions just drop them in the chat i will keep an eye on it and i will feed both questions and hopefully keep us a little bit on track uh-oh uh-oh yeah are you saying you have a plan we have an agenda uh maybe uh maybe i mean people probably already familiar with rome sex so i'm not going to pitch it too much but maybe you can tell a little bit about yourself and how you came to rome of course well first off i i want to thank you ramses for being such a a bright pillar in the community it's like you know i'm one of those people that signed up for the believer's plan before even using the app and you know i've i've seen all the different iterations of this community and for me it's just uh to watch you be this hub of information to me is like ah yes you know i'm not the only crazy one who believes in this note-taking tool so thank you for that uh again i'm bohan um you know my big thing is you know if you ask a different question you get a different answer and especially in regards to zettelkasten uh for me it was everyone else was sort of approaching it from this page level analog way of working and utilizing the technology that rome offers i just asked a different question i go instead of looking at things as pages and index cards what if we looked at it at the block level what if the granularity was at the block and with that you know i've been on this journey sort of you know uh leading rome book clubs and now getting to this point where i mean look at the digs you know and this is all in order to provide the most frictionless way of teaching this simple note-taking system with this simple note-taking tool and to me that's just one of my passions and yeah and i figured there's something about navigating in regards to how quickly i can write is one of the vital i think points in regards to actually note taking if there's friction when i'm attempting to click here and figure out what this does and how do i move up a block or down a block what happens is then it it's like it's like that little bit of friction that prevents me from getting into that really flow state where i don't think about anything but the writing and that's one of the things that sonke would always say it's like you know you want to forget about the tool and you want to focus on the writing so again i did post into the chat here by the way uh the shared graph a link to the shared graph there is no on track hey tracy andy everyone patrick um so i think as well by the way uh i put it in the chat let me let me post it again [Music] yeah how about that did that come up no it's not coming up that's odd well maybe i can put it in the description so people can sure so if you give it to me yeah uh i'll give it to you in the in the zoom chat here yeah [Music] okay cool so again i kind of want to talk a little bit about what is keyboard maestro so for me it's it's i was when i first started using rome i was looking for a way to quickly again i'm not a tech guy at all like i i'm the furthest thing away from that i'm a trained actor and it's like i was living in beverly hills los angeles and that's what i know so getting into like note-taking tools and keyboard maestros and macros to me it's it was it's been fascinating but again i know that there's so much more depth underneath what i've been able to sort of gather so again uh keyboard my show to me was a solution to the problem that i was having in regards to you know i wanted to be able to navigate with that with without sort of lifting my hands off of the keys without leaving my without leaving the mouse this is sort of my instrument this is my this is this is my instrument you know these are my instruments in regards to frictionlessly writing and i knew that if i had hotkeys and short keys available that i could navigate even faster or even more efficiently again keyboard maestro first off it's only for mac unfortunately and i know there's other windows uh there i know there's other mac tools available like alfred alfred recently just got updated so you can do a lot of the things that we're doing here with alfred you have better touch tool as well then you also have windows alternatives which i'm not familiar with like auto hotkey text expanders and you know even mac os and ios i mean you have different ways of sort of customizing sort of keyboard shortcuts as well which i kind of want to walk through as well uh the first thing i want to do is i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and what i want to do is i'm going to before right away yeah vote you uh you gave me a link and i've put it in the chat so probably only i am able to post links uh yes i hopefully people can see it in this chat it's a it's a link to the help database is that correct no that's to my it's a shared graph that uh it's a public uh rome graph that i host ah yeah okay so it's a help graph okay i just i just happen to call it help so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here can you see can you see so this is going to be the system preferences menu inside of um um mac os let me wait wait let's see yeah okay i can i was just checking you know with the latency but i can see your screen and people can also see your screen yeah so if you go into the system preferences you go into keyboard a lot of people already know this little trick but if you go into the keyboard settings and you go to the modifier keys you can actually because how often do you actually use the sort of caps lock key right and so what i do is i actually have this caps lock key as a modifier and so what i have it set as you can you can have it on different different sort of modifier keys i have it on option and you're gonna understand why i have it on option as we go along but you can do it on like i know i know connor and the rest of the rome team they actually prefer control but again i i have a specific use case where i need the option button to be the caps lock key so again keyboard system preferences uh modifier keys and you can change your caps lock key you can change all the other keys as well if you wanted to wait so you you've changed you've changed the caps box key to option because of rome yes okay yes uh i mean i have yes because to me there's something about frictionlessly writing that is vital and you know if if i ever need to do the caps lock i just hold the shift button and you know type away how often do i really use the caps lock key um you also have shortcuts for text snippets here in the system preferences so again you can so if i do ytyt it'll actually create a little emoji so again these are small little hacks that you can do um uh inside of mac os in regards to sort of hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts now i'm going to stop sharing here for a second i also want to emphasize this idea that this does things that i need this does things that i like and i think for anything to be viable for anything to actually work long term it has to form fit to the individual and i think that's one of the key points that i want to emphasize as well i'm just showing you what works for me how you take that and make it form fit and wrap to your needs specific needs is is the process that that i hope i can help bridge by giving you some of these examples i hope that's coming off clear so there's a couple of things before going through keyboard maestro and that's going to be just rome's hotkeys itself let me go ahead and do this i am going to open up i'm going to go and open up rome and i'm going to go and share my screen and you can see correct is there any questions at all no no questions okay um and i am just switching screens all right uh what up what i want to walk through next is just going to be okay i don't know what's taking so long let me go and x out of that i'm just going to close that i'm going to open safari oh there we go we're in i don't know what's going on just cancel oh there it goes um i'm just gonna i'm just gonna use safari for now i mean what am i gonna do yeah i'm gonna go ahead and uh well it's good that you're using a tool that works on os level and not some uh some kind of uh you know extension there's if you really want basic tax expansion capabilities i think there's this cool uh tool called uh textblaze which is a chrome plug-in but if you obviously then you'll have a problem if you switch browsers like you did now yeah all right again this this is the system yeah exactly that's a very good point so at first i want to walk through what you can actually do with rome's native hot keys so if you go again this is the sort of help graph here if you go to the three dots again some of this is very basic but i just want to touch upon everything you go to the three dots and you go to the settings menu you can actually change your hotkeys here as well and there's a lot that you can change and there's a lot that we're actually going to simplify and make easier um as as we walk through here for instance toggle block expanded um again there's plenty of things that you can actually do natively in the graph now i do need to mention this if you change your hotkeys in the rome graph here it's only going to work in that graph so if you have multiple graphs you have to actually go in here and change the hotkeys for each individual graph that's one of the panes and again it is sort of limited because you don't really have access to much there isn't much customization that you can do if you want to map things specifically to your purposes your needs cool yeah i mean it's that was my first reaction actually when when you showed me keyboard maestro and i had left the the like all the text expansion snippets behind because i use smart blocks and i work on rom but i only work in one graph so i don't really run into this problem of uh having to change my my keyboard shortcuts or my templates uh from graph to graph but now i start to collaborate more with people in in graphs and i think you are probably the the the the best known uh multi-player multi-player i would say so uh there's lots of us there's lots of us you you yeah you gave me new perspective of why would you use the texas expansion tool because i become a little bit skeptical and i thought you know it's do i need really another tool in my stack because i'm very picky when it comes to i love to test out tools but to really adopt something and this is one of the tools that i think you can do a lot of things that will save a lot of time so yeah um i i think it's a good point uh that you that you make so it's it's because keyboard mystery it's not free it's only for mac so yeah what what is your alternative if you don't use mac you can still use uh the the built-in shortcut editor right yes so i think i think that is like it's not a perfect solution but then again uh keyword maestro is really good so they're they're surprised to pay right and i i tweeted uh earlier this week i tweeted uh or it was a reply to someone i said i don't really take windows seriously as a as a operating system for knowledge work and why um and i discovered that it's a little bit my ignorance because there are some tools that work on windows um but i've never found them to be as smooth if that is the right word or as frictionless i think yes see and and that's one of the main reasons yeah that i do any of this is because for me that that little bit of friction people in the in the book club know you know i've talked about this before but you know i had a workflow in regards to capturing a fleeting note and there was there was a bit of so basically i had i had a shortcut set up where i would have a siri shortcut that would say okay enter the the timestamp of the youtube clip that you're capturing and the prompt was making me actually verbalize the prompt and that little bit of friction made me lose the fleeting idea it was so fast moving but i figured out that if i typed it in it was a less mental fatigue and it's just it just proved to me how important it is to have a frictionless way of doing a lot of things and again for me it's it's it's this these are my tools and if that's the case i want to make sure that my hands are always using these to write to navigate and to jump and explore so let me go and walk you through this now so again i have the caps lock mapped to the option alt key and the mouse is going to be in my right hand and so for me one of the most important things is is is this i'm gonna share my screen yeah but just to to um chime in a little bit on your point it's like nowadays i think there are over 1 billion people who make money just by working with ideas so they're like not you know knowledge workers and what tools do you use so i i had a friend who made guitars and uh when i lived in spain and the guy he was when he talked about his tools and and like his techniques there was so much passion there oh i like and i think both of us we are like nerds in our own right but in a good sense because we see ourselves as professionals when we were preparing this uh we like hours hours we were we were thinking okay how can we make this work right just setting up the tools to stream this you know this is the first time that we're streaming something like this so i think it's uh it's so important to emphasize that you are conscious about your tools if you make a living yeah working with information yeah or ideas you know any any any of those things i completely agree so i'm going to walk you through my preferences and one of the things for me is if you look on the keyboard i like to have the majority of my shortcuts on this half of the keyboard and there's a reason for that is because if i have it on this hand of the key this side of the keyboard i can hold the caps lock button and i can reach majority of the things here with one hand and that's the whole idea now i mean a lot of people play first-person shooter games i happen to play a lot of counter-strike and so for me it was asdw that provided me with forward back left and right and so what i've done is utilizing keyboard maestro is i've mapped asdw as up down left right in regards to going up and down navigating the block so let me go and show you this um hopefully you can see you can't see this i'm going to have to share my whole screen here for a second give me one second i'm going to share the entire desktop so you can see what i'm doing here so now you can see the entire desktop so what i'm going to do is this you're gonna you're gonna notice inside of here so if i do caps lock a i'm moving back and you'll have the sort of uh the key caps it's gonna show you the the the move that i'm doing again i have caps lock a mapped to the left arrow and say again i'm i'm able to go left and right just using my caps lock and asdw and then i can go up a block as well caps lock w caps lock s will bring me down the block and it's just like it's the exact same thing basically i'm doing the exact same thing as if i was using the arrow keys that's what i've done i've mapped it to the arrow keys but i have it where it's asdw caps lock by holding down the caps lock key i can literally go up and down the block without having to move across the keyboard and that's just one aspect of it now what i also did was i like to go to the the beginning of a block and the end of the block really quickly so if you look at asdw what's to the what's to the left and right of the w key you have q and you have e q will take me to the beginning of the block e will take me to the end of the block and so watch what watch what i do now so as i do so right now i'm in between t and h right here right if i do caps lock q i'll automatically go to the beginning of the block and say i do caps lock e i'll go immediately to the end of the block this is going to be great when i do something like this when i'm typing latex and i type in something like latex if i do caps lock e i'm already out of the latex block and i can keep writing hit escape twice and you'll notice that what what it's doing it's it's removing that little bit of friction because for me to do that i have to hit the arrow key twice and then i can continue writing but if i just do caps lock e it'll take me to the end of the block and so that this is what i'm talking about this is there it's like cherries it's cherries on top but life isn't fair and we get lots of cherries instead of getting one cherry we get multiple cherries on top and again this is just form fitting to what i needed to do what other people may need could be different so that's one aspect of it now what i'll what i want to go through next is that's sort of navigating up down left and right beginning of the block and end of the block right what i want to show you now is but by the way but yeah i just had a realization because i you know again i was skeptical in my mind i was not skeptical toward you but i thought i can do this already with command and the arrow key but then i realized oh wait but this is one-handed like this is one-handed operation and it it's it's feels really minor but it's less movements you know what's friction so another realization man thanks yeah and and it's it's it's it's the difference between like a gold medalist and sixth place at the olympics i mean it is the olympics so i i feel like that matters and that little bit of difference makes all the difference when you're actually taking writing seriously and this is what it's all about and so now you know writing in blocks is one thing the granularity of the block is super powerful but what happens when you zoom into blocks and this is what i want to go through next i'm going to go ahead and share my screen again and before i do that let me go and zoom out a little bit just so everyone can see and now what i want to do is you can see correct yeah okay so what i'm going to do is now i want to show you the zooming of blocks yeah i know i know a little bit yeah perfect thanks yeah great so let me just go over everything first and then i'll walk you through what i'm doing so when i do caps lock and space bar what it's doing it's mimicking control o if you do control o whatever block that you're editing it'll zoom into that block for focus mode this is great when you're actually like contact when you want to focus in on the on what you're doing and so it it mimics control o is caps lock space bar again all one-handed next is going to be caps lock one caps lock one two three and four are all gonna be in regards to the nesting so i'm gonna i'm just gonna walk uh talk about it first and then i'll walk you through it so caps lock one is gonna be the same thing as command shift comma which basically takes you if you're editing a block it'll bring you up one level it'll if you're on a child block it'll take you up to the parent block caps lock three or caps lock two i'm sorry caps lock one is going to go up a parent block caps lock two is going to bring you down a block or it's going to bring you down a child block and then caps lock 3 is going to toggle so there's a hidden rom feature called for slide shows where you can toggle the next sibling block and what i've done is now i have caps lock one two three all on one hand by the way caps lock one two three and four but one two three are going to be primarily navigating the zooming of blocks now i'm going to show you what this looks like so i'm gonna zoom out here so basically what i'm gonna do is this i'm in this block here expander right i'm in this block can everyone see this block you can see that right and so what i'm gonna do is if i do caps lock one okay it's not doing that let me do that again you know what it is i think it's a keyboard maestro setting give me one second no no no no zoom in the block caps lock space is control o control o okay i was hitting the wrong button that's why okay so let me try that again so i'm in this block text expander here correct if i do caps lock space bar what it's done is you'll notice you'll notice how when it's going to show you the key caster here right it's going to show you the both the keys i hit caps lock or option alt space but what it's actually done is actually done control o so it makes me zoom into the block that's rome's native hotkey i've just remapped it so it's easier for me so it's form fitted to me now if i do caps lock one it's gonna bring me up a block and you're gonna notice caps lock one it had uh command shift comma so caps lock one again will bring me up a block bring me up a block and then if i do caps lock two if i'm on text expander here and i have caps lock two it's gonna bring me all the way down the block but let's say i'm in here and i go caps lock two no let's go back in so i do caps lock space bar to zoom into the block i go up a block to go what was the parent block saying again what was this parent block and then caps lock two will bring me down the block and then it'll bring it down the block if that makes sense and so now so now yeah i know this is really cool isn't it so let me let me let me make it a little bit easier to understand so say i'm zoomed into this block here right and i and i go into and i'm in this one and i'm in focus mode i do capstock spacebar zooms me into that block so i can add more text add more add more notes here and then i do caps lock one to jump up a block and now i know where i'm at caps lock two will bring me down the block caps lock one will bring me that up if i do caps lock three it'll toggle me to the next sibling block and then the next sibling block and then the next sibling block and you'll notice how what i'm really doing is now i can keep writing and the best part about it is then i can just with one hand by the way i can go back up i can go back down i can go up i can go to the beginning of the block i can go to the end of the block i can go up down left right between the block and say next sibling yes what this brings to mind is really and i i already see how this game to be because you're the the fleeting notes master and uh um just writing in an indented fashion so going from from um progressively indents so like uh um sentences that together i would say form a paragraph um that's that's what i've seen people also describe it uh as so oh those just look like paragraphs but they're like each sentence or each single idea is is captured in one bullet and then the the idea that that comes after that that is uh like the the child block right so with this like i i keep fiddling around with my mouse and you know this sound this looks really effortless or or frictionless um to to just to keep you in your thinking mode and not interrupt with your thinking exactly and that's really the point of all of this it's it's just to keep you in that thinking concentrated focused thinking mode as m as much as possible i mean there's so many distractions in this world like i get a twitter ping i get an email it's just too distracting and if if i can just learn how to do this again i this this is form fitted to me how it's going to form fit to other people it's going to be independent on what they're used to i i remember growing up with asdw as counter-strike so it was like i know what that feels like and i knew i knew that i needed to have something where it was going to be the simplest for me in regards to my settle casting and this is what i want to show you next yeah wait can we can we jump to a few questions first or of course do you think it's it's better to wait for uh well i i i do want to mention this if everyone hangs out to the end of this call we will i i reached out to keyboard maestro and i told them i was going to do this live stream with rome stack and i was like you know if you want to do like a five percent 10 discount code that would be great the founder got back to me on email he's like we're going to give everyone that shows up to this live stream a 20 off discount for the one-time fee for keyboard maestro which is like 30 bucks so it's like 35 bucks 20 off of that and then you got the license key and you can use it forever it's not like a monthly thing so i thought that was great yeah and then also also i'm gonna provide all of my macros where all you need to do is download it install it and then you have everything that i'm using and then you can sort of play with oh i mean listen i'm not a tech person at all i figured it out just by playing around with it and so i'm gonna provide all the macros that we're using today and i would definitely wait till the end because i'm gonna show you some crazy things you can do when you stack these keyboard shortcuts but anyways yeah i think what you just said it's also a good segue into um because you said yeah you're not you're not a technical person you stumble you stumbled upon this yourself i think that's so great because you came to like this ecosystem i would call it without preconceived notions um i see often like very technical people um in in this rome community it's it's becoming broader now it's not just tech people uh but that's basically what it started out with highly technically proficient people and they assume many things and and um they have just some mental models that like they learned over time and i think you come to this with a fresh perspective you think well um having a 10-step process is not is not logical for me i need something frictional something simple i just want to get my ideas out of my head yeah and we haven't even talked about why you use roam right you use it mostly to [Music] like to screen writing about yeah screenwriting like screen readers yeah story mythological structure the union archetypes and then laying down the thematic patterns that i can't hold in my brain so i need to put it all down and then connect them in a zettle casting yeah and it's sort of it's mind-blowing like i i'm not the type of person to get passionate about note-taking but when i discovered what you can actually do with a block-based zettel castin and i don't mean the zettle cast in that everyone gets wrong i'm talking about straight from son k i'm talking straight from lumen taking those concepts and then applying them not bringing over copy pasting the analog slip box no i'm talking about seeing that this is a note-taking system and going rome is a note-taking tool for networked thought putting those two things together but not like you said bringing along with it all of those preconceived mental models i'm coming at it with i'm not a tech person at all but i understand what you can do with the block yeah and the power of a block yeah hey and so you you've just shown a few um shortcuts yes you know to navigate i think and i interrupted you a little bit earlier i saw later in the outline you want to show a few more things but tracy asked so how do you recommend implementing something like this so um did you like did you have a big bang change where you changed your entire thing or did it grow over time um so uh she asked um yeah how do you go over it my my suggestion is always going to be this and again this is based on what seonke talks about as well you know it's keep it as simple as possible and when when when i needed it that's when i sought it out when i needed a little bit more complexity or when when a little bit more complexity arose that's when i sought out a solution to solve that problem and it was i was writing notes and i realized that i didn't like having to use both hands on the keyboard when to navigate i wanted to be able to do that with one hand and i realized that that was just the thing that i needed at the time and i sought out all the different tools i tested them out and then this one just happened to be the one that i was able to do the most with and that wasn't too confusing it is a little confusing but if you can make a a roam 42 block a smart block you can do a keyboard macro maestro macro and you know another thing is this like for instance like it all started with something as simple as this what i really wanted was i wanted to be able to go back to my daily notes page quickly and i didn't want to do like if if this is say i'm in my permanent notes page right and i'm just going through all my notes i didn't want to go to this and then click on this and and listen there is a shortcut key there is a hotkey to do like command shift t or d or something like that that'll take me to the daily notes page but i wanted something faster with less friction so what i did was caps lock t one handed caps lock t will take me straight to the daily notes page and again this is just this is what i needed and so that was probably the very first instance where i was just like man i wish there was a faster way to do this one thing and that's where it started and then i was like well can i navigate can i zoom what else can i do and and this is where it gets very interesting because you can do so much with this and i kind of want to is there any other questions before i go into this because there's something where we're going to start going into window arrangements all right okay let's uh let's see because the the chat has become is coming alive so i need to filter um maybe if you have a question just uh to make it easier for me just write question in front of it and then um i'll be able to look for it uh but let's see uh looks like you have some fans bo uh in in the in the chat so we're all in this together honestly and you know there is one thing i want to show you and this again well how much time do we have left by the way and we've been going on for about 40 minutes here right yeah i mean i mean i have time so okay let me will and this will be available laser for replay so uh yeah yeah let's let's go let me let me walk through you let me walk through a little bit about how this works so some of the settings actually in keyboard maestro so now what i've done is i'm going to share my screen this is actually keyboard maestro's sort of settings menu so you open up keyboard maestro and this is what you're going to see it's a little confusing i understand so what i'm going to do is i'm going to provide this roam stack sort of macro folder and what you do is you just download it from it i'm sure we'll upload it to like a dropbox or something you download it and then you install it and what you'll do is once you install it you have to sort of act you have to enable so let me go ahead and let me go and do this actually i'm going to go ahead and oops let me not do that actually i'm going to create a new folder and let's just call this test uh upload and what i'm going to do is i'm going to let's see if this works no it's not gonna work okay i think you get what i'm saying so basically you're gonna let me get rid of this one you're gonna get this folder inside that folder you're gonna have all of the different macros so that was super confusing i'm sorry about that uh again it'll be in the description it'll be a dropbox file or something you you download that and then you enable it by right clicking here enable the macro group and then from there i'm just going to walk you through how i actually created this so arrow is like a game what i did was this is going to be triggered by this hotkey and then it executes this keystroke if that makes sense and yes yeah so what you say is at the top it says the the the hotkey you're going to press but in this case obviously it says option s because you've rematched your caps lock and then you can define what other um let's see do i understand it yeah what other key is actually virtually pressed so to say yes and so like you're like uh creating an alias for for keystrokes exactly and again this you have so many different actions that you can actually do so for instance it um arrow is like a game so this is going to be it's going to simulate the keystroke down arrow whenever i do caps lock s but then you can also make it do just about anything that you can do on your mac this is what's crazy because it is hooked into the actual operating system like into what mac mac can do you can actually have it where this is only going to happen if i hit this plus marker here right and i go application trigger and this applic well you can actually have i don't want to walk you through it because it's going to get too technical you can basically have it where if you hit caps lock s it only works if rome is open and if it's not open if you do caps lock s it's not going to do anything so you can basically enable it go ahead yeah you have application specific so you can re oh yeah that's very because i was thinking how many shortcuts can you have before you run out if it's application specific it doesn't matter yeah and again i i don't want to go into the technical details again i'm not i'm not super technical so for me it's you know i figured out the most easiest way of doing it i was like okay type the down arrow keystroke simulate keystroke okay simple but i do want to show you some of the crazy things that you can do with it so what i'm going to do is this i'm going to go into stop sharing i'm going to go and share my entire desktop now and this is what's interesting because what i can do is again this is my desktop if i do caps lock escape i have a menu that's i i programmed with keyboard maestro and i have three different things that i can do and let's say i wake up in the morning and yeah this is this is called rome stack by the way this is a wrong stack you you have no idea how many people have been asking me about this and i've actually i've some coaching clients like more than two have offered me money if i could find them a tool that would arrange this window so i will give you the finder's feet just just just just wait just wait what you can do okay so i have three different ones i'm gonna start with the very first one here the first one is gonna be morning workspace say you wake up in the morning and you're like you know what let me fire off this hotkey which is caps lock escape and i'm going to do morning work space i hit enter and watch what happens good morning well it opened it up on the wrong window oh so it's going to say good morning are you ready for your morning template if i hit continue let's see what happens frictionless i'm just gonna let that settle i want that to sink real quick dude and again this this yeah let me zoom in a little bit so you can see what i just did and i'm gonna do it again one more time okay so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go ahead and uh let me just keep that here for now and i'm just gonna do caps lock escape bar and i'm gonna do morning workspace it's gonna open a new rom window it's going to have a little pop-up that goes this is keyboard maestro are you ready for your morning template i hit the continue button and it automatically types in the template into my rome graph and i can make this and this is just a rome template that i just used like i could have it say anything i could have it right this is basically i just had it type that in again i don't want to get into the technical aspects of how you actually do it i'm going to provide all the macros where you can go in there and fiddle around with it and see how you can play with it again there it's it's not always perfect but it's pretty cool what you can do now that's number one let me go through that wanna saying hell yeah okay let me show you the number two thing caps lock escape and now what i'd like to do is something called office hours so say okay you got your morning workspace done and say you're going into the office and now you're ready to start you start your office and you have a certain couple of windows that you want open i go to office hours i hit enter and it basically opens up your workspace how you want it with the windows and you're getting rick rolled i love it and so basically what i wanted was i wanted to have the rome help database here i also wanted to have um the the the outline for today and then i also wanted twitter open as well as well as rick astley singing never going to give you up now here's the crazy part you can actually have specific blocks open because block the granularity happens at the block in rome right so if i go into this block here it gives me a url that'll open this spot block specifically right but what happens if i go in here and say i click on this block here you see how i'm inside this block because the block has a uid if i copy this url and i paste that url guess what is going to be shown it only shows that entire block and this is what i'm talking about because say you have a specific say you have a specific block that you type into every day and you don't want to go open your room and have to find where it is but you know exactly what that block is if you paste that block url it'll open it to that block where you want it and guess what you're ready to type and guess what caps lock 1 will bring you up caps lock 2 will bring you down caps lock space bar zooms you into the block but this really shows the the the power also of brome i would say and yes i often get the question when do i create a page for something and i say don't you use links use links to link ideas um and you know if you have having the the link references it's nice but it's it's not necessary because you can you can reach every block and as you can see you can tie automations to a block because every block has a unique address and i think once you really grasp that then your way of thinking starts to change how you and how you interact with bro yes so i just want to emphasize that every block has a url uh unique url so um that has some more implications for when true true multiplayer will will become available because then you can grab blocks from from other graphs but this is already so cool how you can on like stack or yeah stack processes on top of a block address for example yeah and and once i realize this i do have pages but they're all collections of for for example for roams i have one single page and everything i i do all the content i create for for roamstack is on that page but it doesn't matter because when i created to do i say work on this i don't have to link to a page i just link to the blog and then i just click that block and that my entire context so i i don't know i i i just love this this frictionless way of reaching a very specific area of your graph so i just want to emphasize that you know there's well brett asked hey bo will these workspace shortcuts transfer seamlessly to a chrome-based space versus safari let me walk you through what i did on keyboard maestro real quick because what i did i actually didn't have it open rome or safari what i did was i have it set let me show you here this is going to be custom menu office hours right i have it set to front browser window with url and it'll open whichever whatever setting that you have set to your web browser it'll open that so if you use chrome it'll open that if you use brave and you set that in your in your settings like in your system preferences up for your mac it'll show that does that make sense yeah absolutely and so again yeah and again it and all the windows in regards to where it goes like you can you can have i have another tool called better snap tool which same thing hotkeys will will snap you to different uh different parts of the window right you can do the same thing with keyboard maestro so basically keyboard my show you get rid of better snap tool you can do it all with keyboard maestro yeah and so and i use moom which is an alternative but it i think it's almost as expensive as a keyword maestro yeah and it's so it's like so for instance if i do caps lock 1 or uh command one it'll snap it to that side if i do command two it'll snap it to the other side this i can do this and now it's like i've got double screen again it's it's so interesting what is capable this is kind of meta here isn't it it's so interesting what is capable with this little tool but we're not done yet there's more you ready for the next one i i i do have one question yes came through yeah and i also wonder it's not possible to feed a url into rome's desktop app yet right so you will if you want to link to a specific block yes you will need to use your browser for now i believe so i'm yeah again it's the only time i use the desktop app is when i have um a really large graph like any other book club graphs but on my personal graph i actually much prefer safari or a web browser because again i don't i know yeah yeah but the reason for that is again it's frictionless i don't want to have to wait for the desktop app to load you know i just i have safari open all the time and i like the you know i like the fact that i'm mindful of what i put him into my room database too like in my own graph i don't just link everything i don't just throw everything in there no it's just there's a certain way that happens so it's very frictionless i don't want to wait 10 minutes to wait for my own graph to load and again can i show you the next part though yeah yeah i'm just thinking also about the the safari over the desktop and i know what i said i know but i think that's because you said um you also like to use the spell check right the yes so it makes sense okay yeah let's continue okay so this next part you might want to be sitting down that's all i'm gonna say okay by the way there's there's there's like summer school happening right now so there's like kids everywhere hopefully hopefully it's not too loud but for this next part i think you might want to sit down because this one's really cool this is what i'm gonna do i'm gonna share my desktop here you can see the desktop correct and check yeah okay so for me again it's zettle casten is the most important thing right and say i'm reading an article christopher alexander's a city is not a tree and i'm reading i'm reading i'm reading i'm like oh i like this i really like this idea and i go what if there was a shortcut for this what if i created a shortcut that form fitted to what i needed and i do caps lock escape and now i've got my little menu bar and i go zettlecaston template with ocr interesting and i hit enter i got a little menu bar again i may i created this little alert inside of keyboard maestro right just so i can demonstrate it it says select and highlight the text that you want to capture and this will take a screenshot so be sure to frame above and below the highlight so that's step one i'm gonna go ahead and do that i'm gonna hit continue and now i've got a little arrow you see this little arrow and what i'm gonna do now is i'm going to highlight this text here and i'm to take a screenshot of that interesting as soon as i do that i get another little menu and now it says copy select and copy the url so i'm going to go up here i'm going to copy this url and i'm just following to the directions here and i go nick continue and so now what what is what's going on so it's opened up a page in my rom graph that i specif specified and then now it says capture your fleeting notes enter into the block and edit to edit and then hit continue so what i'm going to do is this is my staging area for all my captured fleeting notes so i'm going to hit enter one time because i'm going to create a new one and then i go okay now i fulfilled what they alert told me to do and now i'm going to hit continue let's see what happens interesting interesting what it's done it's pasted let's just take a look at what it's done it's pasted the url with an alias link following the simple zettlecast and structure right and now it's going what's the quote and so what is this alert saying the next step will paste the text into one block right so now i'm at the end of quote i'm going to hit continue paste and look at that that's interesting isn't it it's pasted again this is the this is going to be crazy but but now what it's saying is this it's pasted let me just walk you through what it did it pasted the ocr from the article right let me go and go back to this menu and then what it's done it's opened up this little keyboard clipboard history switcher which we'll talk about at the very end and now i'm gonna go look for the image here so i'm gonna make sure i'm in screenshot here i'm gonna i'm gonna right click on this i'm gonna paste the image from keyboard maestro and look what happens inside of rome look at that it uploaded the image nice the screen shy the ocr capture right and so once i'm done with that right click image right gonna go to the end of the block here it says right click on the image paste image continue it's running a macro literature notes fleeting notes done and so now i'm ready to write let's capture and if i close this let me just review what this little shortcut did what it did was it pasted the url from my clipboard into the source right then it's given me the ocr that uses tesseract ocr with keyboard maestro it pasted the ocr again i can go back in here i can fix it whatever i need to do it also gave me a screenshot of the actual text from the article and then it fulfilled the rest of the it fulfilled the rest of the sort of simple lightweight structure that i use for zettle casting where i can just capture my fleeting note now i wonder if you could even automate this further you can you you can have it do anything you want it to do any anything that you can do with a keyboard and a mouse and clicking on anything you can make it happen [Music] yeah i love this i'm uh i'm having a look at the chat why is a screenshot and ocr important for beau it's so i can basically what i'm doing is i can leave these captured notes in my captured page in this staging area and i don't have to come back to this that night i can come back to this captured note next week next month if i do a good enough job capturing this information i have all of my resources so when i go back and process these notes and add it to my subtle casting i have the source material i have the ocr i also have the screenshot and i have my fleeting notes all in that simple structure that i the indented structure that i want and that i sort of have systematized i think i think the question was probably also why would you like to have a screenshot with something this is just what i prefer you can do it however you want yeah right but the whole idea is i i yeah like my head is already spinning thinking oh like my process is and i also wrote this in in today's realms newsletter like we like this is for me this is like game film for knowledge work so we are looking at you doing your thing so you are giving like a a showcase of of uh your possibilities and we get for we need to learn from it yeah yeah for you exactly so what i want to really also again emphasize i keep emphasizing things but it's it's just because you know i do realm sec onboarding uh and then having talked with over 40 people one-on-one um i keep the same things hearing over and over again and everyone is saying oh yeah but just tell me what i need to do and i like i'm not going to tell you what to do i'm going to show you what i do and then you can ask me some questions maybe about why i do certain things or maybe uh how i would do some things differently but ultimately you need to look at things like this and already think for yourself what is it that i can do with this instead of copying you try to think of something that you that really is not frictionless for you currently that you do repeatedly and try to automate that so that is really i think one of the key takeaways of of this session is learn from people like bo but then try to come up with your own system and then if you really want to be a nice person teach it to others so yeah we get like a feedback loop you know chris chris is asking um why doesn't a link to the original source suffice and one of the reasons that i prefer having as much information that i can let me go and show you my own like like this was demonstration purposes in regards to the ocr and how you actually do it but let me go and show you an actual captured fleeting note from my zettle casting let me go and find which one it is let's go to this one okay so can you see this screen check yes yeah so if i go to say captured books here right what i want is all of this information and this information is basically what i this this gives me enough information that i've captured enough of the aha moment so i can come back to this later when i'm ready to start processing this and again the the reason for this is because we are inundated with information overload and i look at it like if i can go back when i'm ready to work on something it's almost like what nicholas lumen did it's like nicholas lemon didn't actually start processing his notes if he didn't want to do it and write a note he didn't do it he would go for a walk he would go have dinner he would do something else but when i'm ready to work i have basically this so let me go and zoom out real quick let me just show you what i'm doing here so i'm going to i'm going to shift click on captured books right i'm going to do my shortcut for uh caps lock t i'll go straight to my daily notes page i'm going to delete this so when i'm ready to work i do current time right and basically by the way i have another shortcut here too look at that so say say i don't like how rome does their current time i set up a keyboard maestro where i do slash t-i-m-e and look what it does it creates that because that's how i like my formatting and then basically what i do is this see this see this see these notes that are sort of in my staging area when i'm ready to work i bring this over as a child block and now everything is nested underneath there and now i zoom into this block by hitting caps lock spacebar and now i'm zoomed into the block you see that i'm going to go and close this and what i'm doing now is i'm sort of i'm narrowing my focus to get ready to work and so now i'm ready to work what do i have i have the quote imagine that was the ocr i have the screenshot which gives me a lot more context in regards to what what this is about and then i've also got my fleeting notes here so now i'm ready to work i'm ready to go in here and start and start processing these fleeting notes how i'm clicking on this and now i go boom i break this up i break this up and i break this up and now i'm ready to sort of again caps lock spacebar i'm zoomed into the block now i can just type and think and write right and then once i'm done with this what do i do caps lock three toggles to the next block right and it's the same thing i go in here i type and write and think and then same thing caps lock three it toggles the next block so what i'm basically doing is i'm toggling all of these block parent level blocks but um what i'm doing is i'm allowing myself to go in here and and and think and write by using the blocks again and the reason and if i do caps lock one i can jump out of the block or jump up a block the reason i have this screenshot the more information that i have the better so i don't need to leave what i'm doing so if i had just the url for instance if i just had this url or if i just had this i would have to open this i would have to find it i have to go where which where was it again but if i take a screenshot and i have the text there and i have the url if i need it then i hope this is i hope this is answering your question chris by the way and then i can do all of my work inside of rome and if i do shift say say this say this screenshot here or say this quote here i have this in the sidebar right and i i jump back into this and i just keep writing i jump back into this and i just keep writing let's go back up a block right i just do and i just keep writing and guess what i can i can write here write and write and think and think and think and then here's the deal if i if i need to if i forgot what i was writing about i have the quote in the sidebar i don't have 10 different sidebars mind you i have one because context switching ruins flow state in my opinion i have one thing that i need i have my quote here i can zoom up to the block i've got the quote i've got the actual screenshot if i need to look at it to get a little bit more context and i can just keep writing and then again caps lock three i toggle up to the top caps lock one goes back up a block caps lock one goes up back up a block once i get my fleeting notes down i go back into my literature notes caps lock spacebar now i'm ready to write literature notes yeah you don't want to leave rome and again this is sort of my workflow that i needed and you know again and then one la the last thing that i'm going to touch upon is the fact that you also have you also have your entire clipboard history available which is amazing which basically means that i can go and if i you know forgot what i what i what i what i wrote then i can go back into my let me go and share that screen real quick um actually it's i don't think it's going to show my clipboard history then huh oh look i'll do it on my desktop how about that you can see this though yeah it's not going to be super big but basically this has my entire clipboard history of everything everything i think it goes back 200 different things that you've typed these are all just testing i was doing testing last night has the time stamp and i can i can paste this as an image i can paint i can set this to the clipboard now so i can make this the now clipboard i can go down i can you know and it's it's just amazing what this little tool can do but again it's one of those things where i have it form-fitted to what i need it to do and that's really what i want people to get out of this entire talk is i'm not telling you what you need to do no this is just what i needed it to do and i found a solution that form-fitted to what i needed and hopefully i can provide you with enough resources with you know 20 discount code you know this live stream um also the macros itself and also the keyboard maestro community is amazing they have a great forum where you just ask hey how do i do this and they'll answer and they'll give you like examples they'll give you macros you just download the macro add it to your keyboard maestro list and then you just enable it and you have it you can play play around with it that's how i learned how to do it and so yeah thank you i love friends i love this and i love this yeah it's i'm a little bit silent because like i said my head is spinning with ideas i cannot help it but and actually i am and i know you don't use smart blocks but i'm actually working on a smart block that will open up the quote in the sidebar for you and then hopefully so what i also saw some people compare this to is workbench so within smartbox there's this feature set called workbench and basically it's you can program what pages and what blocks you want to open where so for example you can run a smart block that will open up maybe a journaling prompt a random journaling prompt in the in the sidebar and then opens up in the main window a writing area maybe a specific page that you dedicate to your entries or maybe it will take you to your daily notes page and this is basically workbench for your os for your operating system so um yeah i and i'm really it's it's working forward yeah is workbench text based because you have to type in the text right yeah so exactly so that that's really that's it's a uh i think you can i think you can combine it with workbench because basically what you can do is you can actually cut that triggers a snippet or a text yeah yeah and then you can actually you can have it mimic like a menu bar and you can like it's crazy what you can do you can mimic a mouse click yeah and you can you can and if you can yeah if you can access a menu on workbench i'm getting chills right now if you access a menu on workbench you can have it go up down choose it hits enter simulates the heart the hardware key enter then it'll run it you can have it pause for 10 seconds as it runs then it continues the next action where it runs another macro will open up you know a spotify playlist and then you can have another rom window open you can you can toggle do not disturb you can do dude a lot dude it's a roam stack that's what it is this is this is a roan stack exactly so i i'm so happy to to have you here and demonstrating this and uh like i already know one of my coaching clients who will be elated because um it's well he he uh he records instruction uh yeah instructional videos for for living so he's a teacher and then he has his workflow and i've been working with him to refine his workflow and really gain clarity about what what are the steps uh that you that you have to take and uh what apps do you have to open what can you shape off and then yeah he has it dialed in but he still is like well i need ten minutes before i can record something because he uh he uses obs to record and then he needs to open rome for a script and then he needs to open uh on another screen he needs to open uh like the programming environment he's going to screen cast and with this he can hit one click key yeah one click and it opens up like like 10 minutes reduced to one second yeah it's that is crazy okay uh let let's have a look at the uh at the chat yeah um and again all the macros will be provided uh the discount code is roam stack if you if you go to keyboard maestro um the discount code is just roam stack uh 20 off 20 off um all the macros i already sent it off to you so and they also have a trial too so you don't have to purchase it you can do a 30 i think it's a 30 day trial and everything works it's a fully functioning keyboard maestro sign up for the trial you can uh download all the macros that i'm providing for today take a look around see how you can mess around with it again it's it's a little packed together but it's also good that way because what i need to use it for is gonna be different than what you need to use it for yeah and the only way to have it that freedom is to have it just open and that's really what it is and it's just interesting what you can do you can do if if and statements you can do if you do this then it'll do this if not you can do window focus things too if if safari is open then it'll do it you can do the shortcut if you have say uh spotify open or google mail open or superhuman open then it'll do that you know and it's there's just so many things that you can do with it i love it dude it's and chris says i love the passion yeah but it's i think it's also we're not geeking out because of the tools right we're getting out because it's yeah to to solve real real life problems so um i don't know if there if there's anything else you you want to show but i think this is a really good point to to to leave on a high note right yeah and uh let's see if there are any questions and if not um just some you can dm me on twitter if anything yeah i'm always available so you can be found at bohan just your name um on twitter that's your handle twitter handle and then uh there will be also uh like an edited recording of of this uh of the screen yeah cast or or the session and i will edit the the uh the description once we go live with the edited um version of of this video and yeah again i will put it in all the macros i will also put it in the bromestock newsletter so go to romestack.com if you're not already a new sort of subscriber it's free bo anything you want to share yeah i think i just want to end with this i mean you were talking about you know why am i so passionate about this and it's here's the thing i've seen people transform as they write in a frictionless writing tool and to me anything that gets in the way of that writing if we can shave down all the things all the friction that gets in the way of that writing that i don't know who like better thinking is associated with better writing better writing is better thinking better thinking better thinking better decisions better decisions better actions better actions better habits better habits better life you know and it's just if we can just keep i just feel like there's a wave that's happening right now and if we can just keep encouraging each other to explore the last one the last fortress that remains in this world is this and i feel like we have an opportunity right now to explore this and writing is essential for that and frictionless writing helps so with that thank you ramses no thank you and uh people if you want to learn more from beau in the future probably maybe but probably um he'll be hosting rome book club again and that is basically a free transformational experience free in the monetary sense because you do have to show up i've done it i've i've showed up every day for one hour because it took one hour to write uh just my feeling notes and getting into the groove of yeah externalizing what's in your mind and actually it's not just externalizing it's it's for me it's a discovery process it's you you you as as you think out loud you go deeper and you well i've i can talk about this for hours [Laughter] thank you man thank you again thank you to everyone that showed up again if you have any questions shoot me a dm on twitter at bohan and you guys are awesome thank you ramses all right thank you okay bye

Channel: RoamStack

Views: 1,240

Rating: 4.5555553 out of 5

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Id: DJ4BA2Fj5NA

Length: 76min 50sec (4610 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021