According to Google:
“A digital garden is an online, personal repository of interconnected notes, ideas, and resources that acts as a “second brain,” emphasizing long-term, organic growth over polished, chronological blog posts. It is a digital “notebook” or “wiki” that is meant to be public, evolving, and interconnected, rather than a curated, static site, allowing for experimentation and non-linear, interlinked thinking.”
My Thoughts:
A digital garden is never complete. It grows as you learn and grow. It lies somewhere in between taking notes and blogging. Instead of time, content is curated by topic, state of completion, and how it’s related to other content.
The digital garden ethos embraces imperfection, and with it, transparency and meta categorization for the user. Digital gardeners are encouraged to experiment, use diverse media formats, and find the tools that are sustainable for them, even if they don’t involve coding.
The concept has been around since the 90’s. I remember reading something about it ages ago, but at the time I had too much going on to really do much research into it, let alone use it as a ‘thought system’. Folks have attempted to revive it, but it’s never really managed to make the comeback some had hoped for.
I’m still intrigued by the idea. To the point where I took the time to evaluate a couple (3 actually) note taking, personal knowledge management (PKM) systems and picked one to include in my own eclectic thought/learning ‘system’. I looked at probably a dozen different systems including popular note taking, PKM, white-boarding and project management packages. Out of that dozen, I came down to three that seemed to each offer some functionality that I was looking for. The three I chose to evaluate are Heptabase, Notion, and Obsidian. I dropped Heptabase pretty quickly. It’s more for white-boarding and project management, things I don’t do much of anymore. The biggest strength of both Heptabase and Notion are in their online collaboration features, while Obsidian is more interested in keeping information local and secure.
While I’m still playing a bit with Notion, I’ve pretty much decided on using Obsidian as my every day driver. It’s geared more toward tech-oriented folks and has a pretty extreme learning curve, but the functionality once you get familiar with the basics makes it an obvious pick. I still like the functionality and structure of Notion, but the limitations of the ‘free’ version kind of leave me wanting. Obsidian does have a couple of subscription-based services, but the core program and myriad of plug-ins are free. The subscription services are for syncing between devices and publishing to the internet. Being a long-time computer nerd, I came up with my own methodology/workflow to fill in the gaps.
I guess, the long and the short of it, is that I’m trying to accomplish very specific things:
I want to stimulate my memory so that I can effectively pass on some of the wisdom I’ve managed to accrue over the years. I want to document the knowledge in a non-linear way, not necessarily in a time-structure. Not: “First this happened, then that happened, then so-and-so told me what-and-such, and finally I did this.” I’m not so concerned with the order I learned one given thing, reduced to a bullet list of tasks. I want to be able to look at how different things, facts or ideas or beliefs gleaned from multiple sources, over time, came together for me and helped me come up with a solution for whatever was going on.
I need a system where I can gather diverse thoughts together and see how one group of thoughts relates to another group of thoughts. I want to see, visually, how over time our collection of new thought compliments our decision making ‘database’ if you will. I want to be able to access that information quickly and have it in a form that I can use and be able to share what I’ve learned. I’m basically looking for a ‘second brain’ to organize and hold onto things I’ve discovered.
Our brain doesn’t think linearly. A thought doesn’t start at the back half of your left brain, move forward three steps, take one step right, then three steps back, then one step right and three steps forward, and so on, compiling information until it reaches a conclusion at the back half of your right brain. When we have a thought, or focus on an issue, there’s all kinds of activity, traveling synapses all over your brain, pulling stuff together that you haven’t thought about in however long, all the while keeping your body functioning.
Even though the idea that we only use 10% of our brain has pretty much been debunked, I still believe that we don’t use even close to the brain’s full capacity for thought, reasoning and learning. Knowing Neurons editor Gabrielle-Ann Torre writes that using all of one’s brain would not be desirable either. “Such unfettered activity would almost certainly trigger an epileptic seizure.” Having epilepsy and still struggling with ‘uncontrolled’ seizures, I’d still love to experience the benefit of using a larger portion of my brain!
Welcome to my rabbit hole!
PS: If you’d like to take a short peak into my mind, I have a link to my Digital Garden on the Workshop page. https://papasworkshop.org/workshop/
