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. For me, it’s not just about jotting down work tasks or personal thoughts. It’s about grabbing a cheap bound notebook, a pen, and a cup of coffee in the morning, and letting my mind spill out onto the page. I’ve tried all the fancy planners and binders, but nothing beats the simplicity of a blank page and a quiet moment to get my head straight.
But I didn’t realize I was setting a trap for myself. I just kept writing, page after page, never stopping to organize or make sense of it all. Indexing? That wasn’t even on my radar until a few years back, when I stumbled across the Bullet Journaling method.
I had years of daily entries, sketches, random notes, and scraps of wisdom piled up on a shelf. But if I ever needed to find something? Good luck. All those ideas and lessons were buried, lost when I needed them most.
Sometimes I wonder how much of that hidden data could have changed my life if I’d just stopped to look back. How much did I lose, just because I couldn’t find it when it mattered?
Losing all that information started to stress me out. Then I found something new: the Digital Garden.
Data to Information to Knowledge
Every day, we create a mountain of data. What we ate. What we did. Who we spent time with. Companies do it too—sales numbers, new hires, endless reports.
All of it becomes data points—little events, each with a time and a result. Maybe it’s revenue. Maybe it’s just a memory.
Data is the starting point of everything.
The next step? Turning data into information. That’s when you start to organize, summarize, and actually make sense of it. Maybe it’s a chart showing if sales are up or down. Maybe it’s tracking your sleep. Or counting how many National Parks you’ve seen.
Information is useful. But the real magic? That happens when you connect the dots and turn it 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 create a weld at an angle flawlessly. It’s the saleswoman who sends an NDA at the start of a sales call to expedite 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 single day. So why do we treat it like an afterthought? Why not gather it, organize it, and actually use it?
The Curious Case of the Zettelkasten
I stumbled onto David’s Medium article about the Zettelkasten method and how it can make you freakishly productive. At the time, I was already playing with my writing tool’s new wikilink feature.
Note: I use iAWriter for all my articles, notes, and documents.
Two things jumped out at me. First, the word Zettelkasten. It means “note box” in German. Second, how simple the whole system is.
Every idea, every scrap of data, every note—indexed and cataloged so you can actually find it later.
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 simple, but it’s slow. Painfully slow.
The Digital Garden
While digging into Wikilinks, I found the idea of a Digital Garden. It’s part blog, part webpage, part notebook. A collection of articles, notes, and links that actually organizes your data so you can find it when you need it.
If you’ve spent time on the internet, you’ve undoubtedly 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.
They call it a Digital Garden because ideas and knowledge can actually grow there. No more dusty notebooks hidden on a shelf. Everything is out in the open, ready to be used.
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 tried tools like Obsidian and TiddlyWiki, but they felt too heavy. If something slows me down, I toss it. I always come back to iAWriter. It’s simple. It lets me write without getting in the way.
I’ve used iAWriter’s tags for years to find my notes. But now, with Wikilinks and YAML Metadata, I can finally connect old, forgotten notes and turn lost data into new knowledge.
Turbocharge Your Life
If you’ve followed my writing on Medium, you know about the existential dread I’ve felt these past few years. My father passed away unexpectedly, and suddenly I was in my 50s.
I’ve lived a wild, grateful life. But there’s still so much I want to do. I want to share what I’ve learned. I want to plant more trees, so my kids and grandkids can sit in their shade someday.
The key? Get organized. Turn all that data and information into something I can actually share.
Isn’t that the point? The legacy we leave? Why let everything you’ve learned, every joy, every pain, every solution, just disappear—never to be found or shared?
Write. Draw. Solve. Organize. Share.