Reagan's Roundup

How I Use Roam Research to Study the Bible

August 12, 2021by Reagan Rose4 min read

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Happy Thursday!

I’m on vacation this week at Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference in Michigan. It’s been an awesome week of relaxing with family and listening to some great Bible speakers.

I’m trying not to spend too much time online, so this is a shorter edition of the Roundup.

Earlier this week, I joined Kate and Kurt on Moody Radio Florida to talk about to-do lists and grace. You can listen to that interview here.

Also, The Redeeming Productivity Show is back for season 2! Here’s the first episode: How Personal Productivity Relates to the Gospel.

Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode.

Lastly, I put out a very nerdy video showing how I use the app Roam Research to study the Bible. I know a couple of you have been requesting something like this, so the three of us can nerd out together now 😂

Alrighty, let’s get into this week’s roundup!

🧑‍💻The Roundup

Daily Screen Time Has Risen to 13+ Hours Per Day (2 mins)

The number of hours we spend on digital devices was already high, but the pandemic has driven that number even higher.

“The average American spends 7.6 hours a day sleeping. This leaves us 16.4 waking hours to work with each day. Given we spend over 13 of those hours looking at a screen of some kind, this converts to an average of 79% of our daily waking hours staring into our phones, laptops, and tablets.”

(Chris Bailey / A Life of Productivity)

Godless Productivity: A Believer’s Guide to Redeeming the Time (5 mins)

Greg Morse nails it with this one. This is why I’m so passionate about creating resources that help believers approach productivity from a Christian worldview.

“Get proper sleep. Organize your day. Get exercise. Watch your diet. Limit distractors. Draw boundaries. Get outside. Keep a calendar. Review each day. Set attainable goals. Say “no” to good things. Detach from screens. So run secular productivity and self-help books…. What lacks in this advice is to ask if God has anything to say on the subject. Natural revelation, not special revelation, is consulted. Principles may abound, but are the most important realities missing?”

(Greg Morse / Desiring God)

The Godfather Notebook (7 mins)

This is an amazing glimpse into Francis Ford Coppola’s process for creating The Godfather (includes lots of pictures).

“Coppola’s strategy for making the complex, multi-faceted film rested on a technique he learned studying theatre at Hofstra College, known as a “prompt book.” He would start by cutting and pasting pages from The Godfather novel into a three-ring binder. Once there, he was free to add notes and comments that would later be used to write the screenplay and plan the production design.“

(Tiago Forte / Forte Labs)

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Just Showing Up Every Day (4 mins)

A great example of how consistency beats everything. Even if you only do a little bit of something, if you do it each day, you’ll eventually see incredible results.

“When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule: ‘I shall write some code everyday before or after work.’ That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones.”

(Kishore Nallan / Typesense)

The Two-Minute Rule and Its Discontents (3 mins)

Laura Vanderkam challenges the common productivity advice that if something takes two minutes or less we should just do it right then and there. TBH, as an adherent to the 2-minute rule I don’t know how I feel about this yet. But she raises some great points.

“Life can disappear into 2-minute tasks. We live in a distracted world, and concentrated blocks of time can be hard to come by. Letting these chunks get chopped up for any reason can limit what you can accomplish.”

(Laura Vanderkam)