I started my personal blog back in 2012, where I was doing deep dive data investigations and then publishing blog posts or articles to my website. It took a lot of time and research to come up with each article, and the energy it took was enormous. Luckily, I was in university at the time, so I didn't have much else to spend energy on. The content I produced on there was incredibly useful. I ended up using them in many talks and re-publishing the content in many ways, and I credit it with getting me my first jobs and getting me immersed in the world of data and technology. However, when I graduated and started working, I no longer had 8 hours each day to dedicate to just faffing around. The blog turned stale, despite me changing the design around a lot (basically a lot of [[Productive Procrastination]]). I just couldn't dedicate that chunk of time to writing such a large amount of content in the time needed before I lose context. I started then trying to lower the barrier to publishing something by creating "Field Notes", which was a sectioned off corner of my blog. This worked initially, and I was able to get a lot of content, but the tech ([[Quarto]] and [[VS Code]]) made it feel like writing into my field notes was a burden. Then I found [[Obsidian]] and [[Obsidian Publish]] for my digital garden, and I think I have a good medium and framework for now. Now, I just drop notes and drafts into the publish queue, and cultivate the ideas until they become polished enough to formally write into a post, in the same tool to maximize continuity. By reducing the barriers to getting half-baked ideas into something consumable, I've been able to write more, and also think more.