Roam Research Tour with Egghead.io's Maggie Appleton - Evergreen Notes and Digital Gardens

Maggie Appleton’s Rome workflow treats note-taking as an evolving system for thinking—not a static filing cabinet. The core idea is to capture ideas as small, reusable “blocks,” then let those blocks recombine over time into evergreen concepts, public-facing writing, and visual explanations. That matters because it reframes personal knowledge management from organizing finished notes to continuously shaping how concepts connect, resurface, and mature.

Appleton blends cultural anthropology with digital “gardening” and programming-education metaphor design. Her background in cultural anthropology—especially digital anthropology—shows up in how she structures knowledge: she’s interested in how people communicate with and interact with digital worlds, and she treats her notes as a way to study and refine those interactions. She started using Rome in late December after building a “second brain” approach earlier in the year, and she credits both internal community momentum at Egghead.io and broader social proof from Twitter threads for pulling her in.

In Rome, she uses a layered model of note types. “Evergreen notes” function as atomic, defensible claims—deeply interlinked units meant to be reused across contexts. She distinguishes these from “seedlings,” which are evergreen notes still “growing”: rough, incomplete, and revisited later to develop into more finished ideas. For public work, she uses “god notes” as a staging area for digital garden outputs—often tied to her website and frequently paired with illustrations. She also tags notes with metadata such as areas, statuses, and types, including prefixes that encode whether something is a book, project, evergreen, or an original creation.

A major practical theme is how she forces ideas to become portable. Instead of writing in page-sized chunks, she thinks in terms of blocks: when she encounters a concept (like what a “block” means in another context), she rewrites it so it can be cut, pasted, and reused. That same portability drives her approach to literature notes. She takes notes while reading—often on mobile or iPad using apps like Drafts—then transfers them into Rome using quick capture and double-bracket page creation. She’s careful about voice: book notes are written in her own words, while direct quotes get tagged separately, reducing later “merge conflicts” when similar ideas appear in different forms.

Appleton also leans on automation and aesthetics. She uses Keyboard Maestro hotkeys and Rome macros to create structured pages quickly, auto-linking browser titles and URLs into tagged tasks or paper/article entries. She customizes the interface with CSS via the Stylus extension, aiming for “joyful” usability rather than a purely functional setup.

Finally, she treats Rome as text-first and compensates for its limits with visuals. When an idea can’t be expressed linearly—especially for her interests in illustration, narrative, and interactive explanation—she develops it on an iPad and then moves roughs into code and a separate system for publishing. Her workflow is bidirectional: text in Rome can trigger visual development, and visuals can feed back into the knowledge system.

Overall advice is to avoid perfectionism. Appleton frames Rome as a constantly evolving stream where structures change as skills and goals change, and she encourages new users not to get overwhelmed by deep customization before they’ve learned what their own thinking requires.