Notes
Digital gardens started as a countermovement to chronological polished blogs and Facebook timelines and twitter timelines^The garden and the stream.
The idea is to get your own personal space or wiki of the internet back. When the internet frist started out, the internet was more static. Everything was somewhat linked together. Nowerdays The internet is a fast moving flexible thing.
Part of showing a mind garden is in designing it the way you want, linking to the places you want. with the layout you want. Not just like on social media or pre-build websites, where everybody has to fit into a given layout or design. You should feel home in your Mind garden, and feel like you realy own it.
In opposition to blogs, digital gardening focusses on a less polished version of articles. Everything published might not be in its final state. There are Different states of notes
Different states of notes
Mind garden is the idea that your notes are in a constantly growing state. The notes do not need to be perfect. They are always changing, and as your knowladge expands, the notes grow. You can emphasise this to viewers of your notes by adding tags like “idea” or “work in progress”.
Maggie Appleton uses the concept of seedlings, budding and Evergreens, inspired by Andy Matushak
Jacky (Creator of Quartz?) Also added Fruits for finished pages, wich I find quite fitting and is also mentioned by Maggie Appleton if I recall correctly.
Gwern Branwen , https://gwern.net/index, has a certanty level, a scale from 1-10 how important a note is when started / when finished git log
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Maggie Appleton also created her Six Patterns for Digital Gardening. She also wrote an article about the History of digital garden.
Different types of writers
https://youtu.be/qkCDevjQISw?si=onvBNkJ5yDwwOPRf
Gardeners Writer Type: Emergent approach, follow the story line to see what grows like George R. R. Martin
Architects writer type: Know everything already about there structure of the notes
Librarian Note taker: people that just want to store their notes
Everybody is a mix of multiple types.
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Think like a mind gardener
How to think like a gardener? There are different Modes of thinking that can be applied to the mind garden. A gardener trusts nature to do its work. Trust the diffuse thinking to do its work aswell
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Maintaining a Mind Garden
To maintain your Mind Garden, you can iterate through the following phases:
- Researching: Looking for new seeds that you want to plant into your garden.
- Rephrasing: Making the seeds your own. Generation effect
- Relate: Connect new ideas them together
- Revisit: Review the notes regularly
- Optional step: Sharing ideas with other people This are basically the same phases as Second brain
Key principles
- Trust your Default mode network. Give your mind space and time to wander
- Think in maps. Try to connect ideas together
- Combine Ideas together. Make it like a lego playground. In reviews, ask yourself how you can chain ideas together.
- Optional: Learn in public. Share with other people. Like Obsidian publish or Quartz
You can also use Time Blocking to do the mind garden activity you prefer. Based on your energy level, you can switch your Modes of thinking or what Type of writer you are.
Deciding on what to write
Maggie Appleton published a site with just a headline and some buzzwords, and haphazered sentences. With a link to her twitter saying something like: “if you want me to finish this, bug me on twitter”
Digital garden can also contain Digital garden campfires
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Tools to Create a Digital Garden
Mind Gardening can all be done on paper, but it is easier to do in tools. The only feature that a tool needs is bi-directional Linking. I wonder if a mindgarden could be realised using Zettelkasten.
Tools that can be used:
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Digital Garden with a Group
Digital Garden with a Group
How would you transfer knowladge in a group It is more of a solo thinking type of practice. Mind gardening is not the right tool for colaboration. IF you want to colaborate, you have to think about how to transfer it into a format that is useful and usable for other people, since there are Different types of writers.
if you want to share it, you might want to split of a part into a seperate mind garden and publish them. You can publish the things that come out of your mind garden.
Mind gardening is great for creating and building new ideas, not so much for comunication and collaboration.
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Learning in public
Publish your knowledge and learning, for example your Mind Garden in public. can be used with tools like Quartz or just as a static html page
Example that Anne-Loure Le Cunff gave uses the following flow: notes ←> Public Digital Garden ←> Essay
To create a public mindgarden, it could be hosted with Obsidian publish or Quartz
A person that is an advocate of learning in public is Shawn Wang https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public
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Digital Garden Tips
- Link by concept rather than by exact match. I will often explicitly have a
See also: (some concept)link somewhere if I feel two subjects are closely associated. Linking new knowledge to existing knowledge makes it easy to remember. This has helped me find really cool connections on numerous occasions.- Name notes to be as simple as possible. I prefer using verbs or nouns to make it easier to link concepts and thoughts.
- Good search matters a lot. When I search, I usually don’t know the exact name of the thing I’m looking for, otherwise, why would I be searching for it in the first place? I use search as an entry-point into a single node, then recall by associativity rather than by indexing. But having a good entry-point can make or break my flow into finding what I’m looking for.
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- Try to only add notes to the Digital Garden that link to content that already exist. This prevents storing irrelevant information and helpts link new concepts to already gathered notes.
Other Digital Gardens
Examples of digital Gardens
An example of a digital garden is by Andy Matushak
You can find another list of digital gardens by googleing: Maggie Appleton Github digital garden. She has a compiled list of digital gardens
List of digital gardens
Shawn Wang about learning in public https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://quantumgardener.blog
Lists of other people
https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/showcase
https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners?tab=readme-ov-file github repository by Maggie appleton
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More infos
Verbs of mind gardening Maggie Appleton Mike Caulfield
Tools I Use for my Digital Garden