I’ve wanted to write in public for a long time. It has featured in my yearly goals since 2015. But each year it got squeezed out by work, travelling, renovating a house or starting a family. Anyway, I’m here and I’m quietly making a start.
Why now? Over the last few months I’ve been inspired by the digital gardens created by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Maggie Appletonand Andy Matuschak. A digital garden encourages the idea of writing in the open, publishing less polished notes, and tending to them over time. And I like that idea a lot.
It’s a place for me to collect and refine ideas, work and learnings so that they become more useful over time rather than getting lost in a jumble of meeting notes, to-do lists, journal entries and fragments of ideas.
It’s also a sneaky way of tricking myself into creating more than I consume. Scrolling twitter and saving articles to Instapaper feels like I’m learning, but actually I’m not learning much at all. Because as Andy Matuschak says, collecting material feels more useful than it usually is.
So, here I am — 4 month old baby in my left arm, typing with my right hand, saying, “hello world” 👋