How to keep a Commonplace book for Learning, Growth and Creativity

I have been keeping a commonplace book for around a year or so now and this practice has helped me in so many ways. It makes a good topic for my first regular Steemit post I think, as it is particularly useful for writers and content creators in general.

What is a commonplace book?

A commonplace is basically a written collection of your thoughts and ideas categorised by topic. My commonplace contains my daily journal, but that is just one of many parts of it. Commonplacing is a tradition dating back all the way to ancient Greece and used to be thought at universities and colleges.

Some famous people known to have been keeping a commonplace book would be Mark Twain, Francis Bacon, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and H.P. Lovecraft. I would also consider Marcus Aurelius Meditations as a type of commonplace book.

What does a commonplace book contain?

Commonplacing is a way to organise your thoughts and help you in your self-education. It is where you store ideas and knowledge you come across in your life.

People remember information much more easily when it is categorised and put into context. We get information on all sorts of topics from lots of different sources and I believe it’s more important than ever to organise information to retain what is useful.

How people learn and store information is very different. I prefer text and photos, but I’m sure a lot of people would prefer sketches, drawings, mind-maps, sound-clips, etc. There are no limits, whatever works for you.

How has it benefited me?

• I remember books and articles I read and other things I study a lot better.
• I am more creative. This might be due to having a place to note down my ideas and let them evolve.
• I am much more organised and focused.
• Studying and learning is more enjoyable than it used to be. I think an important reason for this is seeing my commonplace growing as I learn new things.

Categories in my commonplace.

• Daily journal.
  • Events, accomplishments and mistakes.
  • New ideas I had.
  • Decisions I made.
• Month plans/evaluation.
  • At the start of each month I make a plan for the most important things I want to work on and accomplish that month.
  • At the end of each month I review what has happened, mistakes I made and what I need to change.
• Books.
  • I enjoy reading, but before I started my commonplace I didn’t write down any notes from the books I read. Just writing down the most important takeaways from each book I read makes me both remember the content a lot better and also motivates me to actually implement what I learn.
  • I do this for all type of books, novels as well. Reading a fiction novels as non-fiction makes everything a lot more interesting.
• Best practices.
  • Best practices for networking, software development, business processes, sales, etc.
• Decisions.
  • When making bigger decisions I like to write down a couple of points for and against as well as evaluating the decision afterwards. This is a good way to learn from both mistakes and successes.
• Words and concepts.
  • Whenever I read I word I don’t know or there is a concept I don’t understand I make a post about it here.
• Spanish.
  • Learning a new language is good, I started with Spanish earlier this year :)
• Travel.
  • I don’t like to plan my trips down to the details, but I like to make lists of the most interesting places in the areas I’m travelling through to visit them.
• Quotes.
• Business.
• Mindset.
• A Steem category of course :)
• Categories for each of my projects and hobbies.

How to keep a digital commonplace.

Keeping a digital commonplace is the way to go. I prefer to use Evernote, but there are lots of different options like OneNote, Scrivener, etc.

I like the way Evernote synchs across all my devices and is simple and easy to use, just a bunch of cards organised in different categories. I use the iPad version when I’m reading, the MacOS version when I’m programming and writing and the Android version when I’m walking around, listening to podcasts, etc.

I also use Zapier to set send me a new empty journal template for each day. It’s nice to have these set up automatically so it’s quick to just add a line or two on busy days.

Keeping a commonplace is easy to get started with and doesn’t require much time. You just download Evernote or an alternative and start putting your notes there. Once keeping them all in one place gets too chaotic you can start putting them into categories and go from there.

This is how I got started anyways, gradually creating new categories as needed.

Further reading.

• How to keep a digital commonplace by Ludgiv Sundström. He also has a digital product about commonplacing which is really good that I highly recommend.
• How and why to keep a commonplace book by Ryan Holiday. He’s a great author and his article on commonplacing is very good as well.
• Keeping a commonplace book by Theryn Fleming. This is a longer more in dept article that I also recommend.

If you got any questions or comments I’d love to hear from you, and see you if you’re going to Steemfest!