Last week I posted about not having ideas. And I also posted that I was browsing through old entries in my commonplace book and that’s where I got the idea for that post.
And I am still working on how to project (and later retrieve) my thoughts into various apps and note-taking systems, but the commonplace book seems to be the place where I put things that might want to be ideas someday.
Not that I’m definitively saying that it’s the best solution, but I do find when I want to jot down something that strikes me, it’s usually the place the thought lands. For the record, I also have a flat text file named “ideas” that gets slightly more fleshed-out concepts.
I’ve mentioned my most common sorting strategy has always been The Heap. The funny thing is that the commonplace book in Renaissance Italy was called a zibaldone, aka, “a heap of things.” I can draw two things from this: 1) there really is nothing new, just reinvented old ideas, and 2) I can’t be entirely wrong if all of European culture relied on The Heap as a memory aid for centuries.
I’ve used the commonplace book to store server setup details (I manage a small home intranet) that came in very handy when my Raspberry Pi crashed. I’ve sketched woodworking projects in it, drawn little cartoons about things that happened during my day, even done some light watercolor.
The commonplace book isn’t really just a journal (although, I do occasionally add journal entries to pin down certain events in The Heap. Any time I read a book, or find something interesting online, I’ll note down a quote or observation that catches my attention. I’m not always certain why things strike me enough to write it down, but I almost always have some insight later on. I trust my gut on it. Later, a different perspective will often make clear an insight I didn’t know I had.
The benefit to me now is that I have a way to mine for gems to share on the blog. It’s a resource I sometimes forget I have. For that purpose, it’s much different than a journal of daily thoughts, and almost the opposite of a bullet journal, which has its uses but doesn’t really lend itself to receiving random ideas.
And it’s very different than keeping notes on a computer file. There’s something strikingly different about the way my brain works with the organic flipping of pages as opposed to scrolling through a flat text file. The fact that I can scribble other thoughts at a later time, or even dash in a quick doodle is almost the opposite of what can be done with a digital notebook.
If you don’t keep a commonplace book or zibaldone, I highly encourage it. Even just using it as a way to track projects as they evolve can provide important reminders or even completely new ideas out of the blue.
