Commonplace Journaling
A new (to me) concept is commonplace journaling. It definitely isn’t a new concept - John Locke and the Renaissance would take offense to that - but even if I’d heard it before this season of life I doubt that I would have been interested.
The concept of a commonplace book is that you have a space to group common themes together with use mostly of quotes pulled from reading (books, blogs, social media, etc). You may have a page in your journal where you add quotes about empathy (or religion or relationships or sailboats, etc). If you’re studying or writing a paper, you may have one about certain characters or backup for specific examples for your thesis statement. There would probably have been a right and wrong for John Locke (who I’ve seen as one of the most famous people who popularized the use of commonplace books) but today I can see so much freedom in the concept.
The main suggestion I’ve seen is to have an index at the front, leaving space for that to grow, and to use numbered pages (pre-built or DIY). This will help you find any quotes you’re looking for - especially if the “resiliency” page ends up being pages 2, 15, and 32 because you find so many. After the index you could write page headers with topics you know you want to collate on different pages (I think this would probably work best in an academic setting) or just start with the first one you encounter when reading.
Here’s an example of how I format mine:
RESILIENCY -
“quote” (reference)
“quote 2” (reference 2”+)
repeat
Easy peasy.
I’ve started keeping the journal close by when I’m reading, keeping it in my purse or on my desk so that I’ve always got the reminder. If I don’t, I typically take a picture or write somewhere else in the meantime as a “to do.”
So far, having a commonplace journal has helped me think in terms of theme and to decide if something is important enough to me to write down and revisit - not that taking a pen to paper to write a sentence or two down is hard, but sometimes the reality check is nice. Prior to this, my phone was full of screenshots and my journals full of messy quotes in the margins that I never took a second look at.
And guess what? I didn’t even start this in a new journal! I picked a journal that I was about 1/3 of the way through that I hadn’t used in a while and just started. I put two pages for the index and then started numbering from there. Because it isn’t a fresh journal, my tendency toward perfectionism wasn’t triggered - I could just begin. Revolutionary, right?
