What is Digital Garden

A Digital Garden is like a personal, online notebook where you can store and organize your thoughts, ideas, and things you learn. It’s a place where your notes grow and change over time as you add new information or revisit old ideas.

How is it different from regular notes:

  • Connections Between Ideas: Instead of just writing down facts or information in a list, you connect your notes to show how different ideas are related. For example, if you write about one topic, you link it to other related topics. This helps you see how everything fits together.

  • Ongoing Growth: Your notes aren’t finished after you write them. You keep adding to them, updating them, and refining them as you learn more. It’s like a garden that grows over time.

My Strategy for Digital Garden

As I am structuring my Digital Garden (aka note organization), the core strategy to organizing is influenced by Tiago Forte book “Building the second brain”

The Foundation: C.O.D.E. + P.A.R.A.

Forte’s methodology consists of two core components: C.O.D.E. (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) and P.A.R.A (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives). The first is the workflow for using and maintaining your second brain. The second helps you organize notes into folders.

C.O.D.E. (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express)

1. Capture

In this stage, you capture all kinds of notes, and resources into four containers (more on that in a bit).

My main input sources are

  1. Web Articles
  2. Kindle Books
  3. Podcasts
  4. Physical Books
  5. YouTube Videos

The process to capture the incoming articles and kindle highlight is captured here. The captured notes are saved in Obsidian Inbox for further processing.

Note: I’m yet to devise a clean workflow for Podcast, Physical books and Youtube videos. As I figure that out, I will return and update this article.

2. Organize (P.A.R.A.)

Folders and notes, that’s all you need to organize your second brain. For Organizing, my process is captured here

3. Distill (Progressive Summarization)

You have your notes and folders in a personal knowledge base. So now what?

Your notes, as compact as they may be, are still in a raw format. According to Forte, this is where most note-takers give up. You’ve probably created many intricate systems, captured a lot of valuable content, and then let those notes collect digital dust. But not this time.

Once you’ve captured notes into your second brain, you need to distill them. In a nutshell, every time you revisit an entry, you need to chew on it, read and reread, and extract the core message.

This is where Progressive Summarization comes in.

  • 📥 Level 1: Raw Format
    • First, read, listen to, or watch source material and capture the interesting bits. You can highlight passages in books/articles, save code snippets, or save show notes from a podcast. Remember, 10% is enough, so choose wisely.
  • 🅱️ Level 2: Bold
    • Once you’ve added the highlighted passages to your second brain, it’s time to refine them. Read and reread the material and bold the really important parts. Focus on keywords and tips that reflect the core message.
  • 🟡 Level 3: Highlight (or Underline in Markdown)
    • “More highlighting?” Yes! The bolded passages may be the crème de la crème but there’s still room for improvement. If you’re dealing with a long and complex note, highlight bits of the bolded passages and scrap the rest.
  • 📝 Level 4: Create an executive summary
    • Sometimes you may come across a particularly lengthy note that’s difficult to encapsulate in a sentence or two. For such notes, add a bulleted summary at the top and try to describe what the note is about in your own words.

As Tiago says, this is where most of people drop the ball. Information is only useful if it is used.

4. Express

Gathering knowledge for the sake of it is pointless.

Sure, you may nurture your little garden, walk around and marvel at all the notes and ideas you’ve collected. But hey, you’re in the knowledge game. And that means you need to make the best use of what’s in your second brain and create new value out of it.

Here’s how to do that. 👇

  • 🧱 Use Intermediate Packets: Intermediate packets are chunks of work, both past and present, that you can reuse in future projects. That can include distilled notes (see the previous step), unused resources, presentation slides, or checklists, just to name a few. Build on top of those blocks to kickstart new projects much quicker.
  • 🏃‍♂️ Work in increments: Don’t wait until you’re ready to write your 600-word bestseller. Start with an outline, progress to a paragraph, and the next thing you know, you’ll have a whole chapter in place. Deliver your work in increments, even if that means writing non-stop for just 30 minutes each day. Consistency is king.
  • 🤹 Embrace remixing: Every idea and project piggybacks on the ones you had or completed in the past. Look back at your intermediate packets and find ways to incorporate them into your work. Shake things up, spot contradictions, build better arguments, and always have a bunch of building blocks at the ready.