A digital garden is like this collection of notes -- it's [[Personal Knowledge Management]] made public, a wiki, a blog, notes, essays, ideas that aren't organized in any way but hyperlinked together. Unlike a [[Stream of Consciousness]], a digital garden is a long-term place for notes and deep thinking. Things in the garden are things worth taking care of in the future. ## Picking Flowers I write about things that interest me or are related to my job in some way. Sometimes, there's overlap between those two things (haha!). Something I do a lot is [[Research]], and while I enjoy doing that, it's not something I prefer to repeat. By adding research into my digital garden, I can easily jump off what I've done. ### Establishing Candidates There's actually a pre-step that you don't see, called "Fleeting Notes". Fleeting notes are made on a whim, usually one per day, where I dump ephemeral notes. They may be useful, mostly not. If it does prove useful, I *process* my fleeting notes down, copying the information into it's own [[Idea]] and cultivating the information. ## Cultivation Every note in a Digital Garden is like a flower, it needs to be cultivated and fed, so it can grow. Notes need attention and care to be useful ### Growth I currently use a method of marking things "to grow" for manually marking things I need to think about later, as well as a plugin called [[Dataview]] for [[Obsidian]] that lists files from smallest-to-largest size, as well as un-written articles and how frequently they're linked. Using that list, I can cultivate at least a few notes in a day. I set aside 30 minutes for this purpose each day. ### Leaving well enough alone I can mark a note as *evergreen* as well (in keeping with the plant theme), which simply means that I don't feel it needs further expansion. ### Pruning and Collapsing Sometimes, a note isn't healthy on it's own. It is either too short, or too dependent on referencing another note. Notes in this case can be collapsed into one-another, making a larger, more useful note. Sometimes, a note was made just to be a connector between two concepts. It's better to just remove the note if I have nothing to say about it. ## Mapping This is where [[Obsidian]] really comes in handy! Part of mapping your ideas out is to see the connections to allow for further research and cultivation. ![[digital-garden-example.png]] Using the graph view in Obsidian, I'm able to see the connections between my ideas. It's not much because I'm starting out, but it should be a lot in the future. # References - https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners - https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/