Digital gardeners, when planting seeds of ideas, often cut to the core of the concepts they’re dealing with. As a result, the process of planting ideations in a digital garden requires cultivation. During the cultivation process is where an idea grows.
Here is a fun representation with emojis for each phase of an idea’s growth process:
🌱 Seedlings
A seedling refers to a nascent idea in my digital garden. It represents the underdeveloped form of an idea.
Seedlings provide the littlest amount of value when compared to its future stages. However, just like regular soon-to-be trees, my digital garden’s seedlings have yet to develop their roots for them to flourish. In the conceptual lens, this means that I as the machine that planted this seedling will have to wait for my idea to develop. In this phase, it is important that I water the soil within which I have planted my seed. This means, in the literal sense, that I should revisit my idea seedlings every so often. Consequently, I should consume content related to the idea seedling and, as I progress through different materials, allow the development of my idea by creating content on the information I take in.
🌿 Sapling
When seedlings grow, they become saplings. Saplings already have roots, but these roots are not enough to buttress the bigger form of the plant: a seasoned tree. In this phase, it is pivotal that I focus on rooting my idea even more, such that when it furthers its developmental stage, it wouldn’t shake or fall down. Saplings are in the middle of the scale that shows concepts with invisible potential at the extreme left and those with strong potential at the far right.
🌳 Seasoned
Seasoned trees are the second to last form of plants that I put in my digital garden. A seasond tree, albeit already robust, still sheds its leaves annually. This means that seasoned ideas are already developed, but not fully. Hence, they require more tending (removing, re-arranging, or reformulating) for them to progress towards being a fully fledged evergreen tree.
🌲 Evergreen
Evergreen trees are ideas that are already fully developed. Meaning, they are ready to stay in place permanently. Unless, of course, I decide to cut them down by the scale that I want – fully or partly. But they are, despite their vulnerability to my idea blades, ready to bear idea fruits and become catalysts to the growth of novel ideas in my garden.
🔍 Caveat
While seedlings serve as the base form of future fundamental ideas, it is important to note that planting idea seedlings does not necessarily equate to them growing in the future. That is, just like real life plants, when I see little-to-no future for my idea seedlings to grow, I discard them and find new types of seeds to plant in my digital garden. This analogy goes the same for the stages after the idea seedling.
🌱 Seedling Archive
Digital gardens are like books, but continuously revisioned.
It does not, on the other hand, replicate the destructive process that is ubiquitous in the information age wherein the value of information decreases as its quantity increases.
Digital gardens are where ideas grow, rather than shrink.