My COVID-19 workspace, playspace, thinkspace

I started a mind garden earlier in October, replacing my long-defunct portfolio website, and I LOVE IT.

I’ve had it for a matter of weeks, but I’m definitely in the honeymoon stage that makes me wonder why I held on to my old portfolio site that wasn’t serving me for so long, when I could have set this up months ago when I first had the idea!

What I’m Using My Mind Garden For

I’m using my mind garden to reflect on quotes, track what I’ve watched and read, save bookmarks, and note ideas and interesting things I might want to pull in to a story or project in the future.

It’s a place for tracking, learning, and thinking in public. A foundation I’m laying for future work, without knowing what the end product will look like.

I’m still experimenting with what kinds of things I want to post, and how to post them, but my philosophy right now is to not be precious with it — by letting myself post rough and incomplete notes — but also pushing myself to add commentary to anything besides a bookmark. I’m letting myself experiment and change my mind about what I want to post there versus here — which is a little tricky for someone who will not write down something I want to remember if I don’t have an appropriate place to put it, like “the correct” notebook. It is in a sense a virtual commonplace book, a single place to save everything that needs saving.

Why I Have a Mind Garden *AND* a Blog

The mind garden is an incubation space, a place to keep track of articles and ideas in a place where I’ll be able to find them again in six months when another idea blossoms out of that seed.

This blog will continue to be where I post my main articles that stick to my theme here of productivity, inspiration, and creative work. I may post some longer thoughts about other topics over on the mind garden — I’m still working out exactly what I like to post over there.

Why I LOVE My Mind Garden

I’m reading Do Pause by Robert Poynton right now, which helped me pinpoint why I like the mind garden so much. Though there is a little friction of saving and commenting on each thing I read and watch, it forces me to stop and think about why I want to save that piece of information.

Especially during the pandemic, there is a lack of natural pauses in our lives. Less buffer, less autopilot time where our minds can wander and process things, make connections and cement what we’ve learned. No commute, no walking from the parking lot to the coffee shop, no waiting in line. I haven’t even been walking much from “an abundance of caution” as we came to love to say in March 2020, so even that brief interlude in the day is mostly missing.

I have found myself jumping from thought-provoking article to mindless entertainment and back, no separation unless I impose one. No order to the feed I have coming in. It’s all jumbled together.

That means we have to create our own pauses.

Like a bookshelf, my mind garden is a reference place, a place to “physically” save things I might want to look at again

It’s hard to make myself stop and just sit after reading an article that I found especially valuable. It feels a little funny to not be doing anything, so I move onto the next thing.

But logging things in the mind garden — making myself put something in the comment box, and deciding what tags and categories to list the post under — forces me to take a pause. I’ve always been more of a person who remembers things better by writing them down, and even though this is digital rather than on paper, I am hopeful the act of composing my thoughts about an article will help me remember and sort those thoughts better. By categorizing something I’ve read, I kickstart processing it. By commenting on a quote, I must push myself to pinpoint the emotional kernel that resonated with me, or the takeaway that I want to remember.

My mind garden is helping me think better.

What’s Next for My Mind Garden

I decided not to fuss about how it looks, and just start using it, so I haven’t bothered even to pick out a new theme. All I’ve done is choose my highlight color (pink of course) and add some widgets to my footer. Eventually, I’ll get around to picking out a new theme that’s a little more readable, with better proportions.

Once I’m feeling good about what I’m posting there, I may set it up to be more Indie Web style and interact with Twitter from there. I don’t tweet a ton, but have been trying to be a little more present in places where I can interact with other people, and try to share my work where more people might find it.

I’m starting off by saving not everything that I read, but the things I find most impactful when I read them (although sometimes that can be hard to predict), or that I can see myself wanting to refer to. I might start saving more of what I read there, but right now it’s taking a little too long to be able to post everything. I want to set up a micropublishing client that feeds into it that will make bookmarking faster.