I found myself conflicted. Should I share all my thoughts and work openly in the garden or protect my privacy? I’m not sure if anyone was watching the garden even, but it made me uncomfortable. It was also quite unorganized.

I wasn’t getting much out of the digital garden. With the renewal date of my Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish approaching, I decided to stop it. I may come back to it and start sharing again at some point. For now though, I want to write more polished thoughts as a blog. I think that will be more helpful to me and others than an assorted jumble of notes and links.

Lessons learned

What would I do differently?

Organize more cleanly

If I do restart the digital garden ever, I will likely organize it in a more meaningful way. My organization was:

  1. projects: notes for each project I have going on, broken into subfolders.
  2. areas: areas of responsibility that persist, e.g. mental health. kept private.
  3. resources: bulk of the notes about things I’ve learned or created
  4. archive: projects or resources that are not actively maintained
  5. daily: a daily note section for dumping thoughts. kept private.
  6. indices: notes that group other notes together for navigation.
  7. kanban: my task management system. kept private.

I found myself unclear of the distinction between resources and archive. I also found the resources was very messy with partial notes all over the place. I was using my kanban board pretty regularly, so I will investigate new software to manage that. I have a dream of making my own software for kanban boards so it can be exactly how I like, but I’m not sure if that’ll happen.

Journal on paper

Another reason I stopped using this digital garden was because I stopped journaling in the daily notes. I decided I missed paper journals and reverted back to one. I’m enjoying using it now with a fountain pen. Plus, I know my private thoughts are secure and won’t ever be leaked by someone hacking my online repository.

Keep work separate

It was also a struggle because work notes were right alongside my personal thoughts. I want more separation between them. I would keep them much more divided if I continued digital gardening again.