Planting My Digital Garden
I’ve decided to add a new section to the site, a digital garden. It’s a place for me to do public note-taking, to put thoughts that are inchoate, not quite a post yet, and hopefully more coherent over time.
I like this definition of digital gardening from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article on the Ness Labs blog:
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.
I’m hoping that this change will do a couple of things for me. By making these notes explicitly works-in-progress I hope to lower the (internal) stakes for myself around writing in public. Perfectionism and rejection sensitivity are a couple of struggles that I happen to share with many other ADHDers, and they’re often roadblocks to more regularly publishing posts here. I also hope that having some partially formed thoughts out in public will add a touch of social pressure, just a bit of impetus to help keep my momentum up.
A final thought: while I wasn’t originally planning on participating in Blaugust this year (it had actually slipped my mind entirely), seeing someone else’s post on Mastodon was what got me thinking about it, so I think for that reason alone I am considering this a #blaugust2025 post. Possibly my only contribution, but we’ll see how the next couple of weeks go!