It is similar to a digital second brain however, it is typically shared on a website so you can learn in public. You can accumulate your knowledge, and improve your thinking over time in an interconnected system. These interconnected thoughts create more and more value over time as you tend the garden of your ideas and resources.
By learning in public with a digital garden you do not need to seek to only create perfectly polished content before sharing it with the world. You can seek to share smaller, fundamental units of thought that are what some call Evergreen Notes. This is a way to slowly build up a library of your own thinking and knowledge, all connected to valuable resources and citations.
By writing down what you are learning in your own words, research shows you improve your understanding of it and improve your ability to remember it in the future. This is known as the generation effect. sup(1)
Start by creating an evergreen note. Evergreen Notes. Then create another, and another. You can seek to create one evergreen note a day. This will slowly improve your thinking, capturing what you are learning in your own words (the trees of the garden). Over time you can start to link together your thoughts. This will help you stoke your curiosity (the seeds), identify gaps in your thinking, connect ideas, and come up with new ideas (the fruit).
Sources & Inspiration
Both Maggie & Andy served as the primary inspiration to me starting my own digital garden and are an incredible resource if you want to learn more about digital gardens. I continue to see Andy's name appear as an inspiration to many.
Maggie Appleton's beautiful garden.
Andy Matuschak's brilliance can be seen here.
March 13th, 2023 I stumbled upon two amazing garden's:
Jacky Zhao's amazing garden https://jzhao.xyz/
Rob Haisfeld, Joel Chan and Brendan Langen have created a wonderful garden: https://scalingsynthesis.com
Another exciting signal of the success of this experiment is the 'aha' moment I had yesterday with a new insight on a concept I thought I had already clearly defined. I think in writing via Roam, and making Evergreen Notes it is helping me create my create a more robust digital garden. A digital garden is a space where you develop your own thoughts and ideas about what you are learning as you go. This is becoming a powerful thinking practice!
Both Maggie & Andy served as the primary inspiration to me starting my own digital garden and are an incredible resource if you want to learn more about digital gardens. I continue to see Andy's name appear as an inspiration to many.
I made updates to the digital garden page about inspirational digital gardens I've stumbled across. It's incredible to see what people build!
My goal in this digital garden is to create a rich network of interconnected evergreen notes.
Updated Evergreen Notes and made some small adjustments to a few other pages, such as on digital garden, continuing to learn how roam.garden works and what the implications are in building on this particular platform. It has its limitations, like anything, but it is definitely encouraging me to create more quickly than if I were only waiting to create finished blog posts! This is a great encouragement to me, a signal that this experiment is already beginning to work.