Three months ago I bought a plain, unlined notebook and made one rule for it: anything worth remembering goes in. Passages from books, a line from a podcast, something my grandmother said on the phone, the exact shade of the sky on a run. No organization, no tags, no system. Just a running record.
The practice has a name — a commonplace book — and people have kept them for centuries. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is arguably one. So were the notebooks of Da Vinci and Woolf. Mine has grocery lists in the margins, which I like to think keeps me humble.
Why paper, why now
I’ve tried every notes app. They’re all excellent at capture and terrible at return — I never went back to read anything. The friction of handwriting turns out to be the feature: if a sentence isn’t worth the thirty seconds it takes to copy it out, it wasn’t worth keeping.
The friction of handwriting turns out to be the feature.
Rereading is where the magic is. Every few weeks I flip back through and find that the entries have started talking to each other — a line about gardens from February sitting two pages from a note about patience in March.
If you want to start one
Keep the rules minimal: date each entry, note the source, and never worry about neatness. The book is for you, not for posterity. Three months in, it’s become the most honest record of my year — more than my camera roll, more than this blog.
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