The Second Summer: On Recalling a Forgotten Digital Garden

A few weeks ago, with the sun lingering long into the evening and the air finally losing its spring chill, I went looking for an old idea. It was a thought I’d hastily tucked away months prior, during the dim, rushed days of late autumn. I remembered the core of it—something about the rhythm of seasonal change as a model for managing information—but the nuance, the specific spark, was gone. I’d been sure my future self would thank me for preserving it. My future self was now disappointed.

My search began where all such searches do: in the sprawling, overgrown garden of my note-taking app. I typed fragments of phrases into the search bar, watching as it returned hundreds of results. There were meeting notes, clipped articles, half-baked thoughts on books I’d since forgotten reading. Each search felt like pushing through a thicket of my own past productivity, a jungle of saved content with no sign of the particular flower I was after. I had archived the season, but in doing so, I had lost the sentiment.

I finally found it, not through a clever search term, but by scrolling endlessly through a monthly archive. The note was sparse, a ghost of the insight I’d felt so keenly. It read: “*Winter for storage, summer for growth. Are my digital habits perennial?*” That was it. The profound thought I had been so eager to preserve was a cryptic, self-interrogating memo. It was a seed packet, but I had neglected to write what was inside.

This experience crystallized a feeling I’ve had as the days have grown longer. Our digital curation is so often an act of autumn. We harvest information, we clip and save and tag, stuffing our barns full against the intellectual winter we fear is coming. But we rarely plan for the second summer—the moment when we actually need to use what we’ve stored. We are prolific gatherers but forgetful gardeners.

True knowledge management, I realized, isn't just about the efficient capture of autumnal abundance. It’s about planting for the future in a way that anticipates the needs of a different self in a different season. It requires leaving behind not just a scrap of text, but a trail of context. A link to the article that inspired the thought. A sentence on why it felt urgent then. A connection to another note where the idea germinated further.

Now, as summer asserts itself, my approach has changed. I’m no longer just collecting for a rainy day. I’m trying to cultivate my notes with the seasons in mind, planting them with the rich soil of context so they might actually bear fruit when the sun shines on them again. I’m writing for the person I will be when the light is long and an old idea feels new.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: