On gardens and attention
Simone Weil called attention the rarest form of generosity. The garden agrees: what gets tended, grows. What gets noticed, returns.
see also 0312, 0897
Every thought, findable again.
Commonplace keeps your notes linked, indexed, and ready to resurface at the moment they matter.
You do not have a memory problem. You have a retrieval problem.
Note apps treat forgetting as a filing error: pick the right folder and you will find it later. But you will not, because you will not remember which folder, which app, which year. The note was not lost. The path to it was never built.
A commonplace book worked differently. Writers copied passages, added cross-references in the margin, and let the index grow wild. The book remembered for them. Commonplace is that book, kept for you.
How it keeps itself
- 1WriteOne inbox, no filing decision. Drop the thought before it goes.
- 2Cross-referenceLink notes as you write, or let the index propose its own.
- 3ResurfaceOld notes return in context, inside what you are writing now.
A note, in the wild
Notes that cite each other, like scholarship
Every note can point at another, and every note knows what points back. The result reads less like a folder and more like a mind.
Meetings that should have been memos
A meeting is a note that was never written. If it cannot survive as two paragraphs, it cannot survive an hour.
see also 0417, 1102
The two-paragraph rule
Before scheduling, write two paragraphs. Half of meetings dissolve. The other half get sharper.
see also 0897
“I stopped re-reading books and started re-reading myself.”
Begin your commonplace.
Free for the first five hundred notes. Plain files on your disk, readable by anything, forever.
Start your commonplace