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.
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”
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.
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
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.
Folders and notes, that’s all you need to organize your second brain. For Organizing, my process is captured here
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.
As Tiago says, this is where most of people drop the ball. Information is only useful if it is used.
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. 👇