Commonplace

a commonplace book for the present tense

For four hundred years, readers kept commonplace books — one notebook where everything worth keeping was copied out, indexed, and cross-referenced by hand. Commonplace is that book, rebuilt. Everything you write indexes itself: linked, filed, and dealt back to you when it matters.

Begin your bookor read the method first

Specimen — entry no. 412

On attention

The quality of a day’s thinking is set before the first notification arrives. Attention is not spent once; it is spent twice — on the thing itself, then on thethis entry now links itself to seven earlier entries, without being asked residue it leaves behind. The entries below agree with this more often than they used to.resurfaces the next time you write about deep work

What the phone takes in minutes, the morning pays back in hours. Write it down once and the thought stops auditioning.

The method

Capture
Whatever arrives — a line, a link, a voice memo — lands in today’s entry. No filing decisions on the way in.
Cross-reference
Every entry indexes itself. Write [[tea ceremony]] once and it is filed under tea, under ceremony, and under every entry that has ever mentioned either.
Resurface
Old entries return when they are relevant — while you write, not when you remember to search.

In 1706, John Locke published seventy pages on a single problem: how to index a notebook so it never fills up. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books gave every reader an index that grew with the book. Commonplace is that index, automated — three hundred years on, the filing does itself.

Begin your commonplace book.

Free for the first thousand entries. Plain text underneath, always exportable.

Open the first page