how to make a digital garden: a beginner's guide

The post presents digital gardening as a way to become a conscious consumer of information in the digital age. It treats the practice as a personal system for curating, synthesizing, and tending curiosities, with the emphasis on keeping the setup simple enough to sustain and useful enough to return value.

The author explains a workflow built around Obsidian: create a vault, sort notes into eight folders, and move through three steps when a new idea appears. Capture the note quickly, add context and source material, then organize it in the sidebar. Linking related notes is part of building theses over time, and the process is described as something that should keep changing as the gardener learns.

Reading notes

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• Digital gardening is presented as a personal way to curate and synthesize information.
• The setup should work with the user, stay simple, and remain sustainable.
• The author prefers Obsidian and mentions Quartz 4 as an alternative.
• A vault holds the notes, called nodes, and the sidebar is used for organization.
• The eight folders listed are concept, findings, general idea, personal realizations and observations, questions, quotes, rules and laws, and thesis.
• New ideas are handled in three steps: capture, contextualize, organize.
• Capturing means creating a new note quickly so the idea is not lost.
• Contextualizing means adding more information, citing sources, and interlinking nodes.
• Organizing means placing the note in the right folder for later retrieval.
• The post gives examples of adding a concept note, a personal realization, and a thesis note.
• Related notes are pulled into a thesis using wiki links.
• The author says the method is a starting point and should evolve over time.