Commonplacing ✍️
Using commonplace books (or locus communis — commonplacing) is a practice of note taking or recording knowledge or interesting, inspirational and educational elements for future use or reference. Notes are made from reading, experience … anything that is worth recalling.
Keeping records was popular (dare we say, common? 😂) from classical Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, (Da Vinci kept his notes in a big one) and throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Commonplace practitioners included: writers Virginia Woolf (who used the technique to self-educate), Joseph Conrad and W.H. Auden, thinker John Milton, philosopher John Locke and Jeffrey Epstein's bestie Bill Gates. When not with his sex slave Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson kept two types of commonplace books — one for legal and a second for literary endeavours.
Re-emerging in the digital age, the practice categorises information into taxonomies of any topic/subject/source using card indexes, apps like Evernote, Notion and Obsidian, commonplace books, journals, blogs or digital gardens like this one! Even a Second Brain can be built.
While there may be some cognitive overload and other limitations …
Keeping a commonplace book is easy, but using one? Not so much … The task of adding new lines and sentences and paragraphs to one’s collection can become an ever tempting substitute for reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting what’s already there … wisdom that is not frequently revisited is wisdom wasted. Alan Jacobs.
Time Capsules of a Thoughful Life … 🫵
Commonplacing can help in multiple disciplines — from productivity and learning to even athletic endeavours.
Before the mile race, I had it in my notes:
I am going to run sub-4 [minute miles].I typed it in every day for a month. Cameron Myers, World record holder.
To paraphrase Cory Doctorow from the Outboard Brain:
Assuming you consume, digest and excrete information … success depends on the ability to cite and connect disparate factoids. As committed infovores, we gather information from: print, conversation, web, feeds, email etc. We used to bookmark but ended up with millions …
Bookmarks can be annotated — but no one did — until blogging. Writing about useful/interesting topics forces extraction of a link's salient features and elevator pitches upwards. Further exploration is predicated on the ability to convey interestingness — fixing memorable topics as note-taking inserts to mental registers.
Blogging provides incentive to keep blogging — a stream of brain-rewards and accomplishment. Blogging begets blogging — locating and connecting interesting things. Know more, find more, and understand better — it's an augmented-explicated knowledge management system.
Blogs free you from remembering the minutiae of life …
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