American author and philosopher, Criss Jami, has aptly described the challenges we all face every day in our personal lives and organizations in dealing with information overload:
In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on. (Criss Jami, Venus in Arms)
In this post, I will discuss what I see as an antidote to the barrage: the art of commonplacing. As we will see, it is an art practiced by writers, journalists, scientists, clergy, U.S. presidents, students, scholars, business leaders, and philanthropists across eight centuries as a way of narrowing our focus on, and gleaning insight from, those things that are truly important.
1. COMMONPLACING DEFINED
A “commonplace book” is a store of wisdom with a history dating to at least the 14th century. The process of curating the information is known as “commonplacing,” which has the following unique characteristics:
- It first involves selecting “knowledge” that one determines worthy of saving for later as a source of inspiration or wisdom. The selected knowledge often takes the form of quotes, anecdotes, observations, letters, poems, proverbs, prayers and the like.
- This information is transferred into books, notebooks, card catalogs, or, in more modern settings, on one's own website or in a notetaking application like Evernote.
- Finally, the information is organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, so that it can be retrieved, reviewed, and used at a later time.
2. A HISTORY OF COMMONPLACING
The word “commonplace” comes from the Latin phrase “loci communes” which refers to the ability to locate ideas or arguments in order to use them in different situations. In today’s terms, we’re talking about collecting proverbs, quotes, observations, drawings, photographs, sayings or similar material in such a way that they can be readily used and studied at some later time.
The earliest commonplace books are found in fourteenth-century Italy. They were called zibaldone, which, in English, means “a salad of many herbs.” The term aptly described the contents of these books, which included sketches and cursive scripts on a plethora of topics. Noted literary figures of the time like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all kept zibaldone. Below is a page from Zibaldone da Venice, a 14th-century hodgepodge of information, which one author describes this way:
Over 600 years later, you can still open that notebook and see that day. Written in spidery loops are daydreamy calculations regarding how large a particular tree is, and how long it might take to get to Rome. There’s a sketch of a pair of colorful ships, and another of two tradesmen in green hats, examining a meal of bread and fish. Keep flipping through, and a whole life emerges. Scribbles and sketches fill each page. Personal anecdotes and hard-won lessons nestle alongside gathered material, including prayers, copied quotations and lists of spices. (Giaimo, 2016).
Commonplacing became prolific with the advent of the printing press in the 16th century. This invention flooded public discourse with waves of religious publications, periodicals, and satire that had not been broadly circulated previously. People were overwhelmed by both the volume of information available for consumption and the breadth of the subject matter covered. (Evernote Blog). One writer noted that:
We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. (Jacobs, A., 2012)
The question of how to manage and make use of the deluge of information was first answered by Erasmus in 1512. In De Copia, he instructed those who sought to be learned to read and take notes on as many books as possible. In this guidebook on commonplacing, Erasmus notes that “This method … will .. have the effect of imprinting what you read more deeply on your mind, as well as accustoming you to utilizing the riches of your reading.” (Evernote Blog).
The fact that books were expensive fueled the practice of commonplacing. So, readers would read texts, make notes about them in their commonplace books for future reference, then return the book to its rightful owner. (Holiday, R. 2013). One modern author equates the practice to that of the modern blog: “It was a kind of solitary version of the original weblogs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.” (Jun, P., 2015).
Through the Renaissance and early modern period, students, scholars, and just about anyone with intellectual curiosity kept commonplace books for study. John Locke’s,” A New Method of Making Common-Place Books, published in 1706, offered advice on organizing material. (Harvard Views). Carl Linnaeus used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the classification system used by scientists today). (Wikipedia: Commonplace Books). Thomas Jefferson kept two commonplace books, one to keep track of his reading and the other capturing principles and interpretations of law.
In the 19th century, writers expanded beyond religious and theological themes to science, alchemy, ballads – anything interesting or inspirational to the reader. Commonplacing was formally taught to college students and became the basis for other written works. The commonplace books of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau survive in published form. The philosopher and theologian William Paley used his to write a book while, in their commonplace books, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other reflections. (Wikipedia: Commonplace Books). Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Dodgson and the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) kept a commonplace book filled with information, including drawings (shown below), about ciphers, anagrams, stenography, and labyrinths:
The diversity of topics and methods of organization reflected in the best commonplace books of yore evince an essential underlying characteristic of commonplacing, which is that every book reflects the unique interests, observations and tastes of its owner. (Harvard Views). This characteristic made them valuable as windows into the hearts and minds of their authors: “The best commonplace books were so treasured, they were gifted in dowries and handed down for generations. Some of the most illustrious examples have been published as books and preserved in archives from Harvard to the University of Texas.” (Evernote Blog)
In more modern times, author, E. M. Forster, kept a commonplace book, which he used to collect what the New York Times called:
a curious assemblage of intermittently fascinating comments on books and writers, somewhat tendentious meditations on the modern world, and curious bits of knowledge that reconfirm Forster’s skills of social observation – lines of conversation overheard on the train (“Now who was the name of that writer who died the other day and knew so much about horses: not Sherlock Holmes …”), musings about “decorative” uses of beards and notes on the jealous nature of writers. (Kakutani, M., 1985).
Journalist H.L. Mencken “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang,” according to his biographer, (Holiday, R., 2013) and Ronald Reagan commonplaced with an extensive set of notecards. Historian Douglas Brinkley had this to say about their importance to Reagan:
If the Reagan’s home in Palisades were burning, this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade.” (Holiday, R., 2013)
We’ll round out this list of modern-day commplacers with Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. He commonplaces through his blog “gatesnotes.” There, he shares information about the people he meets, the books he’s reading, and what he’s learning. You can follow the blog and sign up for updates at: https://www.gatesnotes.com.
3. SUCCESSFUL COMMONPLACING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
A recent resurgence of commonplacing is likely a reaction to the information overload that we face in the digital age:
It may seem an esoteric practice, but commonplace has re-emerged among digital explorers as a modern solution to information overload. Like letterpress, typewriters, and writing by hand, a new creative class of authors and knowledge workers is employing commonplace as a way to find deeper connections to their work and life. (Evernote Blog)
And in the digital age, we have many flexible frameworks to help us capture, curate, and retain the information we collect. While many still prefer to commonplace with pen and paper, tools like Evernote and OneNote make it easy to curate in a variety of ways (e.g., photo, video, handwriting, drawing, typing, and recording) and to retrieve that information in a flash.
How are we using this information in the modern era? The breadth of uses is as incredible as their means of capture. As one author has noted:
I write and speak about things for a living. I need this resource. But so do you. You write papers, memos, emails, notes to friends, birthday cards, give advice, have conversations at dinner, console loved ones, tell someone special how you feel about them. All these are opportunities to use the wisdom you have come across and recorded–to improve what you’re doing with knowledge passed down through history. (Holiday, R., 2013)
For many, the act of commonplacing is about self-reflection and personal growth:
“Don’t just say you have read books,” said the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. “Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”
It’s invigorating to grow your commonplace book—it’s a tangible reflection of how you’re nurturing your mind, the subjects you’re passionate about, and also the subjects that you’re ignoring entirely.
Knowledge is the accumulation of information; wisdom is knowing how to apply it. A commonplace book champions both. (Jun, P. 2015)
For others, the act has a more practical application. One author has noted how commonplacing can improve the craft of writing:
Another benefit comes from physically copying information. By typing it manually into my commonplace book, I get to experience what it’s like to write a beautiful sentence. I get to re-create the cadence, rhythm, tone, and flow. I get to feel what it’s like to write something that elicits goosebumps or sets off fireworks in my head. I want to know what *boom* writing feels like so I can emulate it someday. (Jun, P. 2015)
Still, another has underscored commonplacing as a source of inspiration for work: “Reading and writing are intrinsically linked on the lifelong quest to discover new possibilities, validate ideas, soak up knowledge from others, and inspire new opportunities for our work.” (Evernote Blog)
So what should you collect, how and where? Given how long commonplacing has existed, the advice on these topics is myriad. Let’s try to boil it down to its essence for the modern commonplacer.
A. Commonplacing Sources
The best advice on sources is to “consume information widely: read, listen, learn, observe and explore constantly.” (Juma, A.) Books are not the only source of information to commonplace. We should also focus on movies, speeches, videos, and everyday conversations. (Holiday, R. 2013).
We also need to be open to seeing what we don’t expect may exist in a given source. Historian Shelby Foote noted, “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.” (Holiday, R. 2013).
B. Selecting Information
The first advice on what to collect comes from John Locke, who, in his 17th century text, A New Method of Making Common-Place Books, notes that the first rule is to be discerning: “We extract only those Things which are Choice and Excellent, either for the Matter itself, or else the Elegancy of the Expression, and not what comes next.” (Evernote Blog). A more modern source suggests collecting wisdom over just facts, arguing that:
We’re not just looking for random pieces of information. What’s the point of that? Your commonplace book, over a lifetime (or even just several years), can accumulate a mass of true wisdom–that you can turn to in times of crisis, opportunity, depression …. (Holiday, R. 2013).
Once we find those “choice and excellent” things, what do we do next? If the material is in a book, there are many sources that suggest writing marginalia that you come back to and insert into your commonplace book later is the appropriate step. As one commonplacer notes:
These days, I mark up books with no qualms. I highlight passages, and write notes in margins, and in doing so the book becomes my own. The author’s thoughts and my reactions are caught on the page together. (Evernote Blog)
This practice of marginalia has a long history:
John Stuart Mill hated Ralph Waldo Emerson, and we know this based on his copies of Emerson’s books where he made those (private) comments. You can also see some of Mark Twain’s fascinating marginalia here. Bill Gates’ marginalia is public on a website he keeps called The Gates Notes. It’s a way to have a conversation with the book and the author. Don’t be afraid to judge, criticize or exclaim as you read. (Holiday, R. 2013).
Another method of flagging book passages for later capture into a commonplace book is the use of page folds. Still another is the use of post-it flags. (Holiday, R. 2013).
C. Storing Information
Once we have decided what to collect we must next decide where to store it. This is a place where there is broad debate. There are diehards who argue that commonplacing should be done with pen and paper:
Technology is great, don’t get me wrong. But some things should take effort. Personally, I’d much rather adhere to the system that worked for guys like Thomas Jefferson than some cloud-based shortcut.
That being said, I don’t think the “book” part is all that important, just that it is a physical resource of some kind. If you do want a book, Moleskins are great and so are Field Notes. (Holiday, R. 2013).
If you’re going to commonplace in a journal, I recommend scanning it from time to time using an optical character recognition (OCR) program into a digital format that you can easily search and copy for later use. Sure, you could adopt the system invented by Locke and others to organize your journal entries, but, again, why would you put yourself through this pain if you don’t have to?
And then there are those who favor using digital tools for commonplacing. Jamie Rubin, a well-known blogger on going paperless, transfers his marginalia, quotes, and thoughts into a single commonplace notebook in Evernote. (Evernote Blog). Another blogger, Devon Henderson uses Evernote in a similar way, noting that “I am able to quickly reference items I’ve saved on mobile using tags that narrow things down, and then by browsing. I like having to look at my items dozens of times–it helps me remember they’re there.” (Evernote Blog).
D. Organizing Information
Once you’ve decided what to collect and where to collect it, the question remains, “how do you organize it?” There have been many masters of yore who have devised very clever systems for organizing content entered into paper journals. My hat is off to them.
But we now live in the digital age where being smart about the organization of archived material can make finding and, should I mention, actually using it a breeze. Think about it. Why would you go to the trouble of collecting things if you couldn’t easily find what you collected and put it to some productive use at a later time?
Like Jamie Rubin, I use a notebook in Evernote as my commonplace book. I already have a system of tagging things in Evernote that translates well for my commonplace book and makes it super easy to find things with Evernote’s robust search capacity. You can find out more about this system in this post.
I keep my commonplace book notes in a notebook called, not surprisingly, “Commonplace Book.” I have a note within this notebook called *Table of Contents. (The asterisk in front of the title means that this note will move to the top of my list in the Commonplace Book notebook when I sort the notes from A to Z based on their titles).
My *Table of Contents Note, shown below, explains the purpose of my Commonplace Book and shows the five major tags around which it is organized. I refer to this note often to keep my commonplacing honest and orderly. It is important to make your commonplace book your own, so my method of organization may be very different from how you would choose to organize your own commonplace book given your own determinations about what is important to you. What I believe all good commonplace books have in common, however, is that the organization is simple enough that you can easily file things you want to save and quickly find them later when you need them.
And here is a quote I “commonplaced” last week as I was viewing a news story of Barack Obama’s eulogy of the late Senator John McCain:
I quickly clipped this from a CNN article on the web using the very handy Evernote Web Clipper. I gave it the "#QUOTES" tag, one of the 5 tags that I use to organize things in my commonplace book, as noted above. I also gave it a meaningful title. With Evernote’s powerful search features, I’ll find this in a flash going forward. What’s also remarkable, however, is how easily I was able to clip, save it, and move on. That’s a good system – no fuss, no muss.
Other Evernote users have additional thoughts on this topic:
To stay meticulously organized and reduce overlap, I started writing two to three sentences before each transcribed note. This provides context into why the quote is meaningful and serves as a primer for me to understand the context in which this statement was said. If I need to know more, I know which book or article it’s from and what page. (Jun, P., 2015).
4. THE UPSHOT ON COMMONPLACING
If we are to confront the eye of the storm of information overload successfully, we need to steel ourselves with a habit of focusing our reading, listening, and observation on what is truly important for our personal growth, for improvement of our organizations, and for inspiration. Commonplacing is a tool for cultivating this habit and for extracting from the deluge of information what, in the words of John Locke, are "those things which are Choice and Excellent," in other words, those things that are worth saving and reviewing because they bring meaning to our lives.
I've written extensively about how I use Evernote to improve my productivity and you can view those posts here. For a limited time, Evernote is offering 40% off of the annual cost of a Premium Subscription, which means it can be yours for just $41.99. To explore the offer, click here, then, in the next screen, click "Learn more," as shown below, to get the deal.
RESOURCES
Evernote Blog. Taking Note: What Commonplace Books Can Teach Us about Our Past. (Available at: https://evernote.com/blog/taking-note-commonplace-books/).
Giaimo, C. How to Keep a Zibaldone, the 14th Century’s answer to Tumblr (Atlas Obscura: August 29, 2016) (Available at: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-keep-a-zibaldone-a-13thcentury-answer-to-tumblr)
Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History: Commonplace Books (Available at: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html).
Holiday, R. How and Why to Keep a “Commonplace Book.” (August 28, 2013) (Available at: https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/)
Jacobs, A. Commonplace Books: The Tumblrs of an Earlier Era (The Atlantic: 6/3/2012)(Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/commonplace-books-the-tumblrs-of-an-earlier-era/251811/)
Jami, C. Venus in Arms (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform: 2012).
Juma, A. What is a commonplace Book & Why You Need One (Available at: http://alyjuma.com/commonplace-book/).
Jun, P. How to Keep a Commonplace Book with Evernote. (12/4/2015) (Available at: http://motivatedmastery.com/keep-commonplace-book-evernote/)
Kakutani, M. Commonplace Book. By E.M. Forster. Edited by Philip Gardner, Books of the Times (Dec. 18, 1985) (Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/18/books/books-of-the-times-232663.html)
Wikipedia. Commonplace Book (Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book)