With the new surge of pen and paper use, one new topic I have heard recently is what is called “commonplace book”.
A commonplace book is advertised as a book where you log in quotes, inspiration, and other things, and are indexed by color coded sections or other similar method to organise the book so you could search through it later. It’s meant to preserve your knowledge you found in your day-to-day life.
When I learn about this concept, on thing that stood out to me immediately is the name “commonplace”. The word is pretty specific that I don’t think the concept is new, so I did a search and find that the concept is pretty old.
The core concept of commonplace book is to organise knowledge with in the notebook itself. I would say it’s similar to the modern idea of Second Brain.
What is commonplaces?
Basically, commonplaces is just a technique using table of content and index to allow quickly finding specific topic or content in a notebook that might contain contents on multiple topic.
That’s it. The process is quite simple.
But as the modern commonplaces focus on quotes, recipes, and overall lifestyle topics, we forgot the root of the technique. This can be used to organise work note too. It’s just a simple way to make thing more organised in a single notebook. This solved one of my main problem with paper notebook: what topic to use the same notebook and what topic should I start a new notebook.
The above problem is really hard for me that it pushed me toward using electronic notes. Because I with e-notes I can just create new notebook as much as I needed.
Best of both world
Still, commonplaces techniques still leave on thing to be desired: quickly finding things. There’s table of content and index for sure, but these still need to be search manually and maybe across multiple books.
I don’t remember where I read this from, but basically, you can label each notebook a unique ID, then you replicate the index and table of content on your computer in whatever word processing application you like. Then you can now search on your computer, and go to that specific notebooks. Best of both world!