A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Instead of polished articles displayed in reverse chronological order like a blog, a digital garden is more like a free form, work-in-progress wiki.
Relations to Zettelkasten
There are different categories of notes in both Zettelkasten and digital gardening that can roughly translate to each other.
Digital gardening tends to be a superset of Zettelkasten ideas but more geared for public consumption rather than strictly a private endeavor.
The garden term represents the idea of notes which are constantly tended and exist in various stages of development.
I stole ideas from both, put them in the idea blender, and came up with a bag of mixed metaphors for my Zettelkasten that I really like.
Idea Journey
🍃 I use the daily note in journal/ for fleeting ideas that get tagged #daily. These ideas come and go quick so it’s important to have a quick way to capture the idea. I use a voice recorder when not in front of a PC.
CTRL + Non desktop Obsidian
🌱 The next stage of an idea is germinating it to a #seedling where it graduates to the root folder as an individual idea linked to from the original journal entry. This is where thoughtgasms turn into legible, coherent, atomic ideas.
Tending to a seedling involves connecting the idea with other ideas within my knowledge base in order to gain understanding of the idea and how it fits in with what I already know. This process also involves tending to various other #evergreen notes I find along the way:
- fix a link here,
- fix some formatting there,
- reexamine if the idea still makes sense
- or if it leads me to another thought tangent
- connecting infinite ideas together in infinite ways… 🤯
🌲 Once an idea feels more fleshed out, it graduates to #evergreen. These notes I feel like are reasonably well thought-out ideas that I intend to keep around. But all ideas can be changed, merged, or deleted.
History is kept with git.