What is a digital garden? In short, it’s a website where someone shares thoughts in development. It’s both a personal wiki and a blog, a place where one is wrong publicly and refines their ideas (and pages) over time.
It’s a place of discovery where your interests take focus. You learn, write, rest, and then return to learn and write some more. Unlike most traditional “blogs,” your entries might change as you grow in your understanding of the things you write about. You might think of it as your personal note-taking system that is slightly formalized for public view, though not written for a public audience explicitly. People have called it a “second brain” or “digital commonplace book.”
I am the audience for my digital garden and I come here to explore ideas and document what I know; however, I’m publishing it to the web to share with others and provide a place for them to explore my ideas, too. I’m here to work on writing skills, iterate, and be vulnerable.
Tools
Every gardener needs tools to build and maintain their plots. The tools you use for your garden may be different than mine. Generally, you’ll need some kind of note-taking system and a website/web host to put it online.
My tools:
- Anytype (note taking software)
- Raindrop.io (bookmark management)
- Github (deployment workflow from desktop site to Github Pages)
- Github Pages (web host)
- Arboretum Wiki
Best Practices & Lessons Learned
I started this digital garden in December 2024 and I am very forgetful so there is much room to grow.
May 4, 2025
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Be patient with how long it takes to flesh things out. I had a lot of ideas at once and did a pretty good job at capturing what knowledge I’d like to capture, but it was a bit overwhelming to suddenly have all these pages to fill out fully. No pressure to get things done all at once. Let the thoughts percolate over time.
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The pace at which I update my PKMS is not reflective of the pace at which I am learning or gaining knowledge. I don’t rush to this to update every time I learn something and my approach is and has always been to build it out slowly as I have time among other projects and things going on in my life. I know this and yet I feel weird that the site does not always accurately reflect the currency of my understanding of things! Especially the new pages where I definitely know more than what’s written there!
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Don’t feel pressured to increase expectations of yourself. This has been a good lesson to learn. Although I hope this site will end up serving as a portfolio piece, it’s not actually a professional assignment. This is a personal project that I decided to do because I was interested in taking on this challenge. There is no reason to pressure myself to do “more” unless I want to. I don’t mind drifting in and out. Simply starting a list of topics is pretty cool in itself, I don’t need to be at the “end of this site” (whatever that means) immediately!
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I am learning how to be okay with being or appearing wrong online, either due to lack of knowledge or outdated information. If you’re a comment person, it’s hard to do this because people get very angry when you’re wrong.
June 14, 2026
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Building a content strategy is difficult with no content. Especially just as you’re starting, if you don’t know what you want to do with it but you know you want to do it, it’s difficult to find “the perfect” way to organize or time to engage. The first year or two felt futile and weird until I got my flow going. First I tried to do it every day, then I tried to go in sprints or build time constraints (10 weeks, 3 months, every other weekend). I explored different tools (Obsidian, Anytype, Quartz/Github). I was doing all this with bare minimum content and not much understanding of how the categories might grow. You can only anticipate and guess your future needs so much, which is why the next bullet is important to keep in mind.
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Start it bare bones, then iterate. Don’t approach one method as your forever method; your approach will grow and evolve just how you will. You have to get started to get anywhere, though. For the first year and a half, I changed up the flow every 6-8 months to find a good foundational process that fit in my life, pacing, and information collection styles. Each increment built on the last. It appears to change less over time, but rather focus on improving in incremental ways. I think once you find a flow that fits into your learning and life flows, there will be less huge changes unless your life has huge changes that impact those parts of it.
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Keep track of your processes. Document what you’re doing and how, and update that document as it changes. The act of documentation will help you notice gaps and think of the approach more structurally. Keeping it updated will help you pick up where you left off if there’s a gap in use (life happens, digital gardens can be revived at any time).
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Notes are the baseline of a digital garden or PKM. If you don’t take notes, hopefully you have an impeccable memory. Don’t think of your PKM or garden as “a platform that will help me organize my thoughts and files.” It’s more like a system of processes and flows. The platform/software helps keep the files organized, but rarely dictates how or what to organize. That is what you’re figuring out in the first year or two. Note everything you find interesting or that you want to include, but don’t pressure yourself to “include every note” or “do something” with every note. Sometimes they are just a note, just a seed. It doesn’t mean it has to grow into more. Part of what makes digital gardens interesting to explore is the variations in styles, depth, voice - all pieces of your collection.
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This is a slow hobby. There are few quick wins unless you’re constantly engaging. However, most wins will arrive over time and in connecting with other thoughts that arrive over time.
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You can do it privately. It doesn’t have to be public. Or it can only partially be public. Any part that is public will “feel” different because it’s been written through the lens of having a reader outside of yourself. That’s pretty cool, notice it.
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Do what you need, not what someone else needed. You can read what others have done for their needs, and definitely experiment with customizing ready-made ideas, but ultimately the system will only work best for you if you cater to your needs. Even if someone’s use cases and purpose seem similar to yours, it’s probably rare that two people have the exact same requirements and contexts. Remember, it’s not just a software: It’s a system of thoughts, ideas, and threads that you’re working into the flows of your thinking, learning, and creative processes. For example: My garden/PKMS requires no less than 9 apps/tools to manage, but they all serve a purpose. Don’t let anyone tell you minimalism is better if it’s not better for you. Do what you need to do to keep track of the stuff you want to track. Part of why I have so many is that I choose simple tools over complex ones, so they tend to only track 1 thing at a time using the exact specifications I need (vs general specs to cover many things).
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Prune the garden so your ideas can grow. This can mean removing dead ideas (archiving), or perhaps decluttering and reformatting. You’ll certainly spend some time clarifying statements, sorting, and tagging.
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Find gardening memes. Read jokes about slow growth and waiting for results. It helps you remember that the same is true for digital gardening.
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Be messy! Let yourself be messy with it! Like nature, your digital garden will be imperfect, and that’s okay.
Links
Digital Garden Terms of Service
I have a right to be wrong or incomplete in my Digital Garden, either due to paucity of time or knowledge. You will not hold this, or my readership, against me because I will keep learning, with your help. Everything in the Digital Garden is a living document and I will retract or rephrase things I no longer agree with.
Organising a personal Knowledge Management system
Growing up and changing is part of the human experience and the tools that accompany you on this journey such as your PKM should follow that same logic.
How I built myself a Digital Garden
With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience. With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time. Tom Critchlow The Digital Garden is a kind of second brain (I took the wording from Tiago Forte). But it is also a place to wander, to think and reflect, to engage with one’s own thoughts and ideas. A kind of culinary exercise of the mind (according to a phrase by Richard David Precht). It helps me a lot to have a central place where I can file my ideas and, above all, find them again.
Transforming Chaos into Clarity: Template for Projects and Hobbies
After creating this, I set a reminder to be reminded every Saturday evening to sit and write. That’s all I’ve done. And for the last four weeks, I have been working on this project. You can see my profile and check how many articles I have published.
Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes
I also find the metaphor of a “second brain” troubling in that it doesn’t speak to the significance of embodied cognition and tacit knowledge in how human cognition works. Filling up a “digital brain” as if it were a filing cabinet is highly unlikely to lead to meaningful knowledge and wisdom.
Modification History
2026
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6/14: Updated with more lessons learned I recently drafted.
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3/11: Reviewed and updated for currency. Updated with highlighted styles to experiment with the new options I put in the CSS today.