Maybe A Digital Garden Was What I Intended To Create In The First Place?

November 10, 2020

2) Writing wasn't fun anymore

When I would write a blog post, I would always start with a blank page and a massive backlog of ideas. The act of writing a well-formatted blog post is intimidating. That is the part I don't enjoy.

I realized I was overthinking it. The things I write about are straightforward and often very technical. They're more for me than anyone else. Writing helps me think and understand so I decided to embrace this and change the way I write.

Instead of writing long, formal blog posts for others, I now write smaller (usually) brief notes about a specific topic to build up my own personal knowledge.

This collection of notes can then be used to Learn in public, sometimes referred to as a Digital Garden.

Link: How and why this site exists – Eric Gregorich

Sad to say, but I'm at this point right now. Just the thought of writing a decent blog post somehow renders me exhausted. Not to mention, my mind has been stuck on the idea of, not everything has to be shared online. It's perfectly okay to go through life, to let things happen to you and not have to share it online.

Writing this post took a good bit of effort on my part. I had to make sure to finish it in one sitting, otherwise it would have gone unpublished for sure. Needless to say, I've all but given up on the 100DaysToOffload challenge. I got to 76 posts. That's as far as I could go.

Lately, I've been spending time writing code, instead of writing entries on here. At this point in time, I find more satisfaction in producing a working application, as opposed to a new blog post or journal entry. It's not that I don't have anything to write about — my bullet journal is filled with topics to write about. But lately, I just don't feel like I'm publishing something of value on here. I guess I also finally got tired of writing journal entries.

One of the reasons for that is this slog of writing one post after another, but never being able to connect them into a more cohesive idea or insight. There's also this constant battle going on in my mind, between writing for myself and the readers. I like to think that I'm writing for myself. But as soon as I hit publish, that post goes out into the world to be read by anyone. So, am I really writing for myself? I don't know. So, when I ran into this idea of a digital garden, it got me thinking. Was a digital garden what I wanted to build in the first place?

It kinda fits with one of the reasons why I started this journal. It is a place for me to share thoughts and ideas — that I think are good thoughts and ideas — from my bullet journal. What I seem to be missing, is a way to connect those thoughts and ideas, and to build them up into a useful insight for myself. Sure, I can organize posts using tags. But that only helps me find other posts with the same tag. I've never been able to say, build a knowledge-base out of all of them.

So, a digital garden would help keep the focus on writing for myself. Not to mention, it is a better fit for storing the thoughts and ideas that I've written down on my bullet journal. It will have notes, thoughts, ideas, that are meant to be read by me. They just happen to be available online, or not. From what I understand, it doesn't even have to be shared online.

So, this is where I'm at right now. I'll start looking into how to build a digital garden in the next few days. I'm not sure if this new direction will pan out, but I'm honestly excited to dig into it. I hope this post finds you well. I'll catch y'all later.

Tags: #Bookmarks #Blogging #DigitalGarden #Reflection #Writing

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