I have been using a Commonplace book on and off for the last few years. Though I never knew there was a name for it until I came across an article in Superorganizers, How Naveen Keeps Track. An interview with Naveen Selvadurai, the co-founder of Foursquare. It outlines the many systems he uses to organize his personal and professional life, what he reads, and how he spends his time. One of these systems is the Commonplace book, where he is using just a private WordPress blog, where he keeps track of interesting things he comes across.
There are many note-taking books, journals, scrapbooks, sketchbooks, daily planners, here is a quick video by Jordan Clark explaining a commonplace book:
I keep a physical notebook with me to help organize my day. To quickly jot down notes, quotes, lists or doodles. It is also a place where I can capture ideas and thoughts at the moment, and use it to draw inspiration from at a later point. The problem is that over the years I have filled a number of notebooks, and all that knowledge and inspiration is sitting on a shelf.
Why not go digital?
Writing down notes has proved to be an effective tool for remembering and recalling what I am taking notes on. It also allows for some critical thinking as the note is being written. It is very easy to copy/paste or bookmark something interesting, without having to think how or why is this beneficial. I have hundreds of bookmarks of articles to be read, but I have no context of why I found it interesting in the first place. This lack of organization is also true in my physical notebooks. If you take away all the day-to-day planning, all the inspirational notes and ideas are randomly spread across a number of books. The knowledge becomes lost. This is where Naveen’s approach struck a chord with me, on how I can improve my note-taking by going digital.
Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.
Commonplace book, Wikipedia
Keeping a daily notebook is great for short term notes. It is not the place to put ideas you want to retrieve in the future. Creating a source of knowledge and inspiration should be captured within a single medium that can support it. A notebook does not allow for the knowledge or ideas to grow. In a blog, items can be categorized and tagged into several criteria. This allows for items to be recalled or (re-)discovered at a later time. This allows for ideas and inspiration to be easily drawn upon when needed. The blog also records items chronologically. Similar to a mind-map, it can implicitly document the growth of an idea or project just by adding to it.
Big picture
It is fascinating to look at how successful people organize their thoughts and lives to continually be productive and self-improving. Looking at Naveen’s approach to keeping a commonplace book, is only one system of many. He has many different tools in place to capture different things in his life. There is no single tool or practice that will capture everything, and no single way is the right way.
Next Steps
I will continue to keep my notebook with me, but I will attempt to move my ideas and inspirations to my blog. I have come up with 2 strategies (systems) on how I will manage this:
- At least once a week I will need to transfer things from my physical book to my digital commonplace book
- Use an app. WordPress has one. I can directly write and publish to my digital commonplace book with ease. With my phone, I can easily take pictures of literally anything and publish them.
Using a personal blog allows me the flexibility of keeping somethings private and share others with everyone. I can still freely doodle in my notebook, and snap a picture of it to capture with very little difficulty. This is what blogging is about.
