From Notebooks to Digital Gardens: Transforming Data into Knowledge

How Journaling, Zettelkasten, and Digital Gardens Can Help You Organize Your Life and Turbocharge Your Productivity

I love journaling. Whether it’s personal thoughts or tracking work tasks, ad hoc designs, and any important thing I need to remember, I love using A5 bound notebooks. I’ve tried Franklin Covey planners, random planners, and even loose-leaf binders at times, but my favorite is still a cheap bound notebook, a pen, and a morning coffee to organize my thoughts and plan my day.

However, I didn’t realize that all this productivity would eventually paint me into a corner. I never bothered to organize or summarize my journals. The idea of indexing all this information never crossed my mind until a few years ago when I discovered the Bullet Journaling method.

I had years' worth of daily entries, sketches, notes, and interesting tidbits stashed away on a bookshelf. But retrieving any of it was nearly impossible. I could never access the valuable ideas or knowledge I’d accumulated over the years to repurpose or spark new thoughts.

I’ve always wondered how much of that “hidden” data could’ve been reused with reflection. How much new knowledge could I extract from it? How much of it was lost simply because I couldn’t find it?

This loss of data and information began to stress me out—until I discovered the concept of the Digital Garden.

Data to Information to Knowledge

Every person and organization generates an enormous amount of data daily. For individuals, it might be things like what we ate, did, or who we spent time with. For organizations, it’s sales figures, collateral created, and new hires.

These everyday activities are called data points, and they can be recorded as events that happen at a specific time with a specific outcome—like revenue generated, for example.

Data is the starting point of everything.

The next step is turning that data into information. This happens when we organize it, sum it up, and present it—like when we create charts showing whether our sales are going up or down. On a personal level, we might track our sleep patterns or how many National Parks we’ve visited.

When we transform data into information, it becomes useful. But the real value comes when we combine pieces of information and transform them into knowledge.

Knowledge is the full realization of data and information, enhanced by your own experience. It’s the expertise of a welder who knows how to flawlessly create a weld at an angle. It’s the saleswoman who sends an NDA at the beginning of a sales call to speed up negotiations. It’s you recognizing red flags on a date and deciding against a second or third meeting.

We use data, information, and knowledge every day to navigate life. So why should we be so casual about it? Why not gather, organize, and use all the data we generate?

The Curious Case of the Zettelkasten

I stumbled across David’s great Medium article about the Zettelkasten method and being freakishly productive. This was around the time I was experimenting with my writing tool’s new wikilink feature.

Note: I use iAWriter for all my articles, notes, and documents.

David’s article struck me in two ways. First, the term "Zettelkasten," which is German for “note box” (or “box of notes,” depending on context). Second, the simplicity of the system.

Every idea, every bit of data, and every piece of information is systematically indexed and cataloged for easy retrieval and future use.

Let’s say you had an idea for a new Medium post (like this one) about journaling. You’d look it up in your Zettelkasten, pull the relevant notes together, and see if you could organize that data into information, and eventually into knowledge.

It’s a simple but slow process. So. Damn. Slow.

The Digital Garden

During my research on Wikilinks, I discovered the concept of a Digital Garden. A Digital Garden is something between a blog, a webpage, and a notebook. It’s a collection of articles, notes, and links that organize data into information for easy retrieval.

If you’ve spent time on the internet, you’ve surely come across Wikipedia, the world’s largest digital encyclopedia. You could lose hours there because everything is organized, indexed, and summarized, making it easy to find what you need.

It’s called a Digital Garden because of all the ideas and knowledge that can flourish there. Unlike a dusty A5 notebook hidden on a shelf, everything is visible and accessible.

Setting Up Your Digital Garden

If the Zettelkasten system interests you, all you need are four things: paper, a pen, a place to store your notes, and a way to index or summarize them.

For those of us living in a digital world, software tools are more convenient. Researcher Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ph.D., wrote an excellent article on the various digital tools available to help you set one up.

I explored options like Obsidian and TiddlyWiki, but they felt too “heavy” for my needs. As a writer and note-taker, anything that interferes with my process gets discarded quickly. In the end, I always return to iAWriter for its simplicity. It doesn’t get in the way of my stream of consciousness.

I’ve long used iAWriter’s tagging feature to find my notes, but with the recent addition of Wikilinks and YAML Metadata, I can now link together forgotten notes in my iCloud storage, transforming lost data into new knowledge.

Turbocharge Your Life

If you’ve followed my writing on Medium, you may have read about the existential dread I’ve felt these past few years—after my father passed away unexpectedly and I suddenly found myself in my 50s.

I’ve lived an amazing life, full of gratitude, but there’s still so much I want to accomplish—both personally and professionally. I want to share more of what I’ve learned and experienced. I want to plant more trees whose shade my children and grandchildren can enjoy someday.

The key to doing this is being more productive by organizing my data and information so I can share the knowledge I’ve gained.

After all, isn’t that what it’s all about? The legacy we leave behind? Why let everything you’ve learned—the joys and pains, the designs, the solutions—go to waste, never to be found or shared?

Write. Draw. Solve. Organize. Synergize. Share.