I am building a public online digital garden

As someone who has productivity as both a hobby and some sort of job, I have been looking for some sort of outlet. Let me try to explain. The dream has been to find something that is low effort and gives me motivation, happiness and something I look forward to doing. When I say low effort, I mean in the sense of not having to do it, but doing it because I want to. Because social media management is my day job, content creation is my side business, and I also create content on analog tools, I needed something that I looked forward to that I did not have to do.

For example, I love writing on social media, but struggling with motivation is a terrible excuse not to do your job. So even if I am uninspired and unmotivated, I still have to post. With my digital garden, things can and should be unfinished, they can be half baked. They can be bad and that is okay. That is a little bit of the point. I love taking notes just to make sense of things and to think. I like the act of thinking without an end goal. So I am hoping that sharing a knowledge garden or a digital garden makes it formal enough that I feel some pressure to remember it. Because I have a tendency to start things, do them for a week, and forget about them. So publishing it makes it something I have in the back of my mind, but letting things be unfinished and broken makes it so that I don’t feel too pressured. If life gets too hectic, it is okay to take a break on my digital garden.

Me needing a hobby is not the only reason to create a digital garden. With the rise of AI, I have been worried about the future, about my future. I have been asking what makes me special? What makes me, me? Why would someone choose to watch my content over AI content? Why would someone hire me over an AI agent? Some would say that the reason is taste, and I kind of agree. But I would say that it is my thinking. Not what I think, but the way I think. Why do I like one thing over another? Why did I choose to connect two notes together? Why did I capture this one note and not the other? What am I passionate about? My digital garden is also a description of who I am and what makes me, me. It is not only a place for my notes, but also a place for figuring out who I am. What are my values, my passions, what do I read? Why do I read it? What is the unpolished version of me? Because on Substack, YouTube, and all of my other social media, you get the polished version of me. The version of me I present. While my digital garden is a more unpolished version of me.

There will always be things, notes, ideas and thoughts that I just keep to myself. My actual note taking system is analog and lives in journals, notebooks and local markdown files, combined with Linear and Canva. (Yes, I write my blog posts in Canva or VSCode. I am weird.) But I am trying to replicate my actual note taking system as much as possible. I use an analog Zettelkasten, and my database in Notion replicates that, but some of the notes I might choose not to include in there.

The Tools

You might want to do this yourself, and since I test productivity apps and build productivity systems every day, I thought I would give you my two cents on how you could do this. There are so many ways. You could use an app like Sublime or Are.na. Those are both great, and I actually use Sublime for personal use, mainly collecting inspiration. The reason why I did not pick Sublime as my note taking tool for this digital garden is because it feels much more like a curation tool. I am curating my inspiration, and the Sublime engine actually connects things for me and helps me connect different ideas. That is great when I am working on a blog post or a project where efficiency matters, but my digital garden is supposed to be slow and manual. I have enough efficiency in the rest of my life. I want notes to be forgotten and I want to do things manually, so I chose Notion. There are other great options if you are looking for a bottom up approach. Obsidian with Obsidian Publish is a great choice. That will cost you some money, but I would say it is worth it if you can afford it. I even think you can add your own CSS to it, which is a reason why I might go back to Obsidian later. Other great apps are Roam, Craft (a little hard to work with) and even something like TiddlyWiki, but I think that has a little bit more of a learning curve. Mymind is also a great choice if privacy is important to you.

I think this is something everyone who loves taking notes should consider, and I think you should also keep this away from your main note taking system. Because there will be a little bit of performance whenever you share something, and in your real note taking system you don’t want that. You just want honesty.

Here is the digital garden: Notion