Resonance Blog 6. - Mind your garden

Mind your garden

In one of the old newsletter posts that I run into The mind garden, I found the idea about “mind garden” and how notes, ideas, and all pieces of information that are relevant and have some value to us should be stored, connected, and could at some point lead to new ideas. In this blog post Mind garden about the same idea, the author explains that just taking notes in your word about something will enforce your memory of it:

When consuming content, grow branches on your knowledge tree by taking notes. Short notes, long notes—it doesn’t matter as much as writing your thoughts in your own words. That’s called the generation effect, and it states that you better remember information when you create your version of it.

In the nutshell, the mind garden metaphor looks like this: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits).

Taking care of your garden is important and could improve your life (talking from my own experience). In the world of information and misinformation overload, it is hard to filter, process, and store all the relevant (information that is relevant to you) pieces of information. So keeping track and being able to return and review previously read information could be vital. As David Allen (author of the Getting Things Done® - David Allen’s GTD® Methodology book and methodology) said:

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them

My mind garden at the moment looks like this: - low priority information is temporarily saved in the Pocket app - Ongoing reading notes I save in the Private Markdown Editor for iPhone, iPad, and Mac | Bear App Bear app or Agenda - Date-focused Note Taking. - After the reading is processed and finished (and I find it important to keep), I save the link with notes and tags in Notion - One workspace. Every team.. At this moment having tags is important for future filtering and connecting ideas and notes

Take a note that your “mind garden” should not become a place where you just store the information and forget about it. You need to visit it regularly, take care of it, and to maintain it so it can grow and live. And who knows what can grow out of it one day…
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Hi, I’m Marko, (mostly) an iOS developer and this is a somewhat weekly list of interesting articles, books, podcasts, music, and videos that I come across during the week that helps me grow or resonate with me in some way. I hope you enjoy it and find something useful here.

I would love to hear from you at @MobileCoding, LinkedIn or via email.