SmartBlocks in Roam Research
I recently learned about SmartBlocks in Roam Research (my note/to-do tool of choice). SmartBlocks allow you to create dynamic templates and actions. I've only really begun to scratch the surface of what's possible but I'll be sharing my findings here and on my blog.
One of the first things I've been setting up is their daily action. It allows you to automatically insert a specific SmartBlock, first thing every day.
My "Daily Check-In" so far includes the following:
A random block from my "Damn you ARE actually good at what you do" page.
On this page, I include screenshots of compliments and other nice things people have said about me or my work. It's a nice reminder to combat the imposter syndrome.
A Gratitude Check
More on that below 👇️
Today's TODOs
This section pulls anything in the graph that's a TODO with today's date attached to it.
Overdue TODOs
Here it displays any TODOs with a date in the past. Tagging TODOs with a date means it will show up in my daily note every day until it's done.
Some Random Undated TODOs
This one pulls in 6 TODOs from throughout the graph that don't have a date on them. I'm most likely going to get rid of this section because I have a ton of TODOs floating around in my graph that aren't relevant. I don't know. We'll see. 🤷♂️
Intentionally Practicing Gratitude
I saw someone else share an example of their Daily SmartBlock and they included a space for a daily gratitude journal entry.
I'm pretty lazy and I wanted to do the same but have some questions as a prompt. SmartBlocks have a function that allows you to pull a random block from a specific page or section.
To save time, I asked ChatGPT to generate a list of gratitude journaling prompts.
It came up with some pretty good ones:
- What made you feel excited or enthusiastic today?
- What delicious meal or food item are you thankful for?
- What recent experience or adventure brought you joy?
Then I just dumped all those into their page in Roam, pointed a couple <%RANDOMBLOCKFROM:xxxx%> at it in my Daily block, and now I get two daily gratitude prompts to remind me of all the things I have to be happy about.
Since the SmartBlock is just referencing the prompt block, when you go back to the page with all of them, you can see all of your responses accumulating over time:
Yet another way to continue to be grateful and reflect on what makes you happy. Gratitude is a muscle and if you don't use it? You'll lose it.
Photo by Esther Jiao on Unsplash