Welcome and happy Friday!

Today I want to talk about thinking. I’ve been thinking about thinking a lot lately.

I don’t know what motivated you to start using Obsidian (or at least start following a newsletter on Obsidian!), but for me, it was forgetting things.

Digital Dementia

Digital Dementia is a real thing, I’ve experienced it. I spent so many years consuming content, that when I decided I wanted to start creating again, I struggled. I could never remember the things I needed to know when I needed to know them.

I struggled with conversations too. I would struggle to articulate concepts that I had been reading about mere hours before trying to talk about them.

It wasn’t good. I’m not even 30 years old, and I was losing my memory. And I believe it was all due to consuming too much without creating my own things.

Obsidian cured me of this. I thought that it might, but I had no idea how successful it would actually be. But I remember things 10-100 times better now than I did before I started using Obsidian.

Because of that, I wrote an article on five ways to improve your memory with Obsidian. If you’re struggling with your own digital dementia or something similar, you might want to give it a look!

Digital Gardening

Part of the cure for my memory problems came from creating a digital garden, so I also wrote about that this week.

Creating a digital garden allows me to keep track of and develop my ideas over time, which not only improves my memory: it also allows me to see how my ideas change over time, which is a good exercise in acknowledging that I’m not always right about everything. I frequently stumble across something in my garden that is not quite right, and it keeps me humble.

In reality I don’t grow my digital garden: my garden grows me. Learn how to grow your own here.

I didn’t mention this in the article, but many months ago I also built a visualization for my digital garden, based on the tags I use within my vault. It’s not very useful, but it is fun to see an actual digital forest grow over time. It’s gotten much bigger since I created this, it was an itty bitty forest initially:

Favorite Links

As always, I consume a ton of PKM content in addition to creating my own. This week, my favorite articles were these:

• ​Atomic Habits review by Merlin Rebrović. A concise and to-the-point review of the main points of the book.
• ​A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton. I love deep dives like this, and this helped inform my own article on digital gardening.
• ​Principles for Selecting PKM Apps by Jorge Arango. IMO, Obsidian passes Arango's criteria with flying colors.
• ​Obsidian 12WY Review Template by Evan Travers. Love the visualizations here.

That’s all for now! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email.

Ciao~

Tim