I found a podcast recently that talked about the concept of Digital Gardening, an ethos for posting what you are learning and all of your personal knowledge online that’s more exploratory, interconnected, and organic than traditional blogging. What struck me was how familiar it was. I’d been working on my blog in a like this not knowing other people had been doing that and talking about these ideas for a long time.

Unknowingly to me, there has been momentum around these ideas with people taking the concepts farther than I had. Maggie Appleton’s article on the history of digital gardening is a great deep dive into the evolution and history, showing how the concept started, grown and inspired others to reimagine their personal online spaces.

What Is Digital Gardening?

Digital Gardening challenges the polished, reverse chronological model of most blogs. Instead of posting fully-formed articles, essays or time-stamped updates - Digital Gardens are collections of ideas; messy, interconnected, and constantly evolving. They’re not about broadcasting finished thoughts; they’re about sharing work in progress, fostering curiosity, and encouraging exploration.

In a Digital Garden, ideas grow over time and are added to. Notes are linked together based on context and themes rather than publication dates, creating a web of connections that invites readers to wander and explore. This reminds me a lot of the early web, where every web site was different before templates and social media turned online spaces into cookie cutter curated, algorithm-driven feeds.

My Blog as a Digital Garden (Before I Knew What It Was)

Looking back, I realize my blog has always been a bit unconventional in this way; I just didn’t know what to call it. I’ve never been interested in creating a perfect and polished website where each post stands alone as a final product. Instead, I wanted my blog to be a space to:

• Share ideas that are still in development, knowing I’ll come back and improve or add to them later.
• Link posts together based on themes, letting people follow the threads.
• Mix formats: long-form essays, quick reflections, lists, lots of youtube embeds and experiments all mixed in a burrito of cheesy goodness. er... at least I hope it's good.
• Embrace imperfection, allowing the blog to evolve with me rather than feeling like a static portfolio.

Admittedly some of this was just fueled by indecision of what I wanted to write about, or an unwillingness to make it about a niche. I wanted it to be about everything that interested me. Without having the words for it, I was building a Digital Garden. I saw my blog not as a repository of finished pieces but as an ever-changing ecosystem of thoughts. But because I didn't know this was a thing, I still was often reluctant to post incomplete ideas. Knowing there are other people has emboldened me (for better or worse) to post all of it.

The Unexpected Connection

Digital Gardening reaffirmed my belief that there’s value in publishing imperfect, evolving ideas. It’s also given me new inspiration to:

1. Embrace Contextual Links: I’ve always enjoyed linking related posts, but I’m now more intentional about creating an interconnected web of ideas.
2. Prioritize Growth Over Perfection: Instead of agonizing over whether a post is “done,” I’ve started thinking of each entry as a seedling that can grow and change over time.
3. Be Transparent About the Process: I’ve begun adding notes to posts about their status (“seedling,” “budding,” or “evergreen”) to let readers know how developed an idea is and invite feedback.
4. Experiment More: Knowing that digital gardens thrive on diversity, I feel freer to experiment with different formats and styles.

A Journey That Began in 2015

For me, the seeds of this journey were planted as far back as 2015. At first, it was just a realization that I needed to take back control of my social media feeds. I started unfollowing accounts that, for various reasons, no longer served me. It was a small but pivotal step toward curating what I consumed and creating space for more meaningful inputs.

In 2019, I started my first Bullet Journal. This method became a turning point for me, providing a system to intentionally capture and organize my thoughts. It allowed me to reflect deeply on my actions, set meaningful goals, and create a clearer vision of the person I wanted to become. I’ve written about it on this blog before, but its impact on my life and creative process can’t be overstated. The Bullet Journal has helped me become more intentional about my thoughts and actions, guiding me toward becoming the person I want to be. Its flexible yet structured approach encourages reflection, planning, and adaptability; all of which align beautifully with the principles of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Digital Gardening.

The Bullet Journal serves as the analog counterpart to my digital garden, a space where raw ideas first take shape before they’re refined and shared. Its emphasis on capturing fleeting thoughts, organizing them, and revisiting them over time mirrors the way I’ve come to see my blog. Both tools are about cultivating growth, whether in personal development or in the exploration of ideas.

Over time, I became more aware of the cyclical nature of consuming information. Books, music, movies, and even social feeds formed a constant stream of data. There was an introspective process that followed: the desire to make sense of that input, to extract meaning, and to refine it into something more tangible. Sharing what I learned through this blog became an essential part of that cycle.

Eventually, the process grew into something more deliberate. What started as scattered thoughts began to coalesce into finalized ideas, and, when I felt ready, these would transform into essays. To me, essays represent arguments about what I’ve come to believe, a culmination of the input, introspection, and exploration that precedes them.

Maggie Appleton articulates this beautifully when she describes how we move from data to information, refine it into knowledge, and, with time and reflection, arrive at wisdom. This framework resonates deeply with me because it mirrors my own creative and intellectual process. It’s a process that digital gardening embraces and celebrates.

Another milestone on this journey was reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. Forte’s ideas about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) deeply influenced how I approach collecting, organizing, and utilizing information. His framework for turning scattered notes into actionable knowledge overlaps significantly with the ethos of digital gardening. Both emphasize the importance of creating a system that grows with you and transforms fragmented inputs into something cohesive and meaningful. Writing about Forte’s book on this blog helped solidify many of these ideas for me and gave me a clearer sense of how to approach my own creative process. Again, to see all the same books listed on the sites was so cool.

Balancing the Role of Social Media

This is not a blanket indictment of all things social media. There are things social media is good at and areas where it truly adds value. It’s a stream, a moment in time, and it thrives at spreading ideas quickly, facilitating connections, and creating serendipitous encounters. But it’s also inherently fleeting and often devoid of context. Social media leaves little room for thinking deeply, and the constant topic switching can lead to a whiplash effect that makes true reflection difficult.

What I want is an internet that is both. An internet where we can have the immediacy and vibrancy of the stream, but also spaces that foster depth, exploration, and context. Digital gardening is that other half for me; a space where ideas can grow slowly, develop connections, and become something meaningful over time. Similarly some folks are even making personal Wiki's to store the collection of their knowledge.

A Familiar Philosophy: "Show Your Work"

As I’ve been thinking about Digital Gardening, I’ve realized how much it resonates with another philosophy that has inspired my blogging journey: Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work. Kleon’s message of sharing your process, documenting your journey, and embracing imperfection has been a guiding principle.

Like Digital Gardening, Show Your Work encourages creators to let others see their in-progress ideas and learn alongside them. It’s about valuing the process of creation as much as the finished product, and it’s a philosophy that has shaped the way I approach my blog. Whether I’m writing about a new idea or revisiting an old one, I’ve always tried to follow Kleon’s advice: share what you’re working on, even if it’s messy or incomplete. But Show Your Work has makes another point, and that is to use this posting of knowledge and learning as a tool to market yourself for future work.

I’m often trying to give away copies of Show Your Work to anyone who shows even the slightest interest in the ideas. It’s become a bit of a personal mission to share the book and its message with as many people as I can. I do this mostly because I understand and can relate to the idea that posting online can be daunting, largely due to the fear of judgment over imperfect content. While I don’t think the answer is to post content without tact or decorum as some TikTokers might suggest, I believe the middle ground lies between perfectionism and authentic expression.

I also share Show Your Work, because I know how terrible it can be to be out of work for significant lengths of time, and I hope an online presence that people own and currate can help protect them from that experience.

Why This Matters to Me

I am a big believer in the concept of Learning in Public. We know that lifelong learning is essential for being the type of humans we want to be. adopting the mindset of learning in public becomes a positive feedback loop for that lifestyle.

If there’s a golden rule, it’s this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule.
You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that’s fine, but we’re here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust

SWYX

A lot of people don't know or may have forgotten that an internet exists outside of social media, but in a world dominated by algorithm-driven streams and the chaos that results, digital gardening seems like a good alternative. It gives a space to explore ideas at my own pace and let them grow organically. For me, this approach seems not only natural but also deeply meaningful. It’s a way to honor the process of learning and discovery, rather than obsessing on the final product.

Since reading about the Digital Gardens and people who love them, I’ve been thinking about how to take my site further down that road. I’ve been inspired to rethink how my blog is structured. Should I redesign it to better reflect the principles of a digital garden, or create a separate space entirely dedicated to cultivating these exploratory ideas? Meanwhile, I could reserve my blog for more polished essays and finalized thoughts. I haven’t decided which direction to take yet, but I am ok with that too. What I have decided to do right now, is tag my content with the "Seedling", "Budding" or "Evergreen" tag to communicate how much an idea has developed.