17
votes
Keeping a commonplace book
I have tried and tried to write a daily journal/diary and always gave up after a while. My longest stretch was over the course of five years. It always devolves into a litany of banality, though, and when I look back at it, invariably appears a bit cringy.
So I have decided to start keeping a commonplace book- a place to write down interesting thoughts, quotes, ideas I come across and so forth. Without the chronological format of a journal I feel less compelled to list down stuff for the sake of it and am actually listing down ideas I'd like to remember.
Do any of you do something similar?
I do! I've been keeping one for several years now. One thing that's helped this along is using highlights in Kindle. If you've ever done this, you can see them all here: https://read.amazon.com/notebook I use Obsidian for all of my notes, I have a dedicated directory for my Commonplace Book. I use tags in a few of them and sometimes link them from my other notes.
Before I learned about Commonplace books it never occurred to me to save quotes out of books and things. Now every time I glance them over I always quickly find something I like a lot.
I still keep a regular journal on and off, but end up moving the info over into a better written note later on.
I keep a (digital) zettelkasten, which at least has some similarities, if organized quite a bit differently. I do also keep a paper journal in the style of a commonplace book-- aside from including the date on which I've taken the notes, the date's not really relevant, since everything in it just winds up in the zettelkasten later anyway, under a date if appropriate, otherwise sorted into whatever section it belongs. That's just because I like the actual activity of handwriting, though.
I would like to offer a different perspective on daily journalling. My experiences are quite similar to yours, but also quite different.
Well, of course, what one does day to day is basically habitual and is often going to follow similar patterns every day! But journalling makes me appreciate the differences as they come -- maybe I went out to a new and interesting place, maybe I ate something delicious, maybe I made a PR in the gym, or perhaps I got an "aha" moment in my work or my hobbies -- isn't that worthwhile to record and know?
Who determines what is cringe and what is not? Whatever we experience on the day to day simply is. I feel the same way sometimes, perhaps because I'm comparing myself to the literary geniuses I read, but does it matter if my writing comes off as simplistic or cringey? Who's going to judge me anyway?
The most crucial reason I journal is to keep a record of my days, and thus my life. The human brain forgets, even events that seem important in the moment are completely forgotten. Like my Google Photos memories bring me joy and remind me of experiences that I had completely forgotten, I expect my journal to be a tool for the same.
One more thing I'm most interested in is the power of using LLMs to recall, summarise, and learn from my past experiences. I don't trust OpenAI with my journals, but I imagine in the near future I'll feed them to some local LLM and get great analyses of all the happenings in my life.
I recently discovered my 2nd blog which I started when I was 12 years old. I'm excited to plug in all my posts into an LLM (when I get the time...) and chat with my 12 year old self. Wouldn't it be cool if I can do the same when I'm 60 and chat with self from my 20s, 30s, or 40s?
There is a note taking app/outliner called Logseq, in which all notes are basically just blocks on a daily "journal page" by default - so you can just write down interesting stuff, or, if something important happened, you can actually write it down and have a classic journal-style note, and it'll all be in the same place. I really like that structure and I feel like it really fits my needs
I mainly collect quotes, so I set up https://quotable.raybetter.com to keep them. I like it being a public resource but it mainly exists so I have a universal place to access it from.
I've tried to keep a commonplace book for 15 years, I always write a few things and then forget it exists and then pick it up a couple years later and feel sad that I forgot about it. I think that speaks more to my inability to build habits than the value of the books themselves! I've started keeping one on my desk; I attend a lot of lectures and discussions over Zoom, so I've taken to jotting down profound things that I hear in those settings with attribution that I can refer to later. That's the best I can do right now, I wish I was one of those very dedicated academics who journals every day and has a detailed record of their important communications and accomplishments, but my working/teaching style is too chaotic for that!