Learn to grow your own seeds rather than waiting for someone to hand you flowers.
Everything I do within this digital space, I like to keep the primary goal of building my digital garden in mind. Taken from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article, to me, this means that everything I do is planned, prepared and nurtured to create the best final product, much like a gardener or farmer tending to their crops.
This means that any testing, development or task carried out is planned and documented. Much like cultivating flowers, plants or trees. I am not just trying to get some lovely flowers, I’m trying to learn how to grow my own to be sustainable in the future (as much as you can in a digital world).
This philosophy is not exclusive to a digital garden, and in fact if you try to apply this ideology to your life, cultivating a mental garden, it could also be very effective. I enjoy exploring these varying ideas and as someone who enjoys the outdoors, I like applying the concept of a digital garden / farm to my digital journey.
You can explore the workings of my mental garden below, I have used the same ideology to apply to my digital garden.
As with everything, my approach to this digital garden is not perfect, the more I explore the more issues I will unravel, and that may mean I have to go back and alter the plans of my digital garden / mental process for getting the most out of my digital garden.
How to get your digital garden to flourish
My current workflow goes something like the below. I always chop and change this and by no means is it extensive. It is very important to me to think about each element of my work flow thoroughly once per task, so that I don’t have to come back and fix mistakes, or redo anything. I try to ensure that once a task is given I effectively do it once. If there is an issue, then I need to go back and adjust my workflow, to ensure that mistake isn’t made again, not just fix that mistake and move on.
You can see from the above I like all of my workflows to begin with prep – including goals, a pause for extra considerations – documenting a clear plan, executing that plan and then reflecting on the task carried out.
This process will undoubtedly be reviewed and changed many times as I develop my work within my digital garden. You can find more on the journey of cultivating my digital garden below.
The things we learned 