Using OneNote as a “Commonplace”
Some years back, I read Ryan Holiday’s awesome post on “How and Why I Keep a Commonplace Book”.
If you’re unsure of what a “Commonplace Book” is — then Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.
Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned.
As lifelong learners, I think everyone should have a commonplace.
Why OneNote for a commonplace?
I’m a geek, who likes to keep things minimal — so I found myself working towards using OneNote as a commonplace, for several key reasons:
- It’s accessible everywhere — on the move via mobile, my laptops etc.
- If I see (or scribble) something on paper (or whatever) — I can store images via camera in OneNote as well.
- I have less things to carry around with me (i.e. extra notebooks).
- I find the organisation of my commonplace evolutionary, and OneNote makes it easy for me to move, copy and re-organise things. I’m a real keyboard nerd too — so shortcuts are a quick way to my heart.
- The search in OneNote is awesome and fast.
- It doesn’t die in a fire. Everything is synced to the cloud, and doesn’t die in a house fire (or device failure/theft).
Bring all of these things together — and you’ve go a pretty neat way of storing a lot of information quickly.
Getting started — general structure
The great thing about Ryan’s system is that it transplants very neatly to OneNote concepts.
“Projects” (big and small)
Ryan uses a “Cropper Hopper” for storing his index cards — these map nicely to Notebooks in OneNote.
I have a “core” notebook called “Commonplace” that I use as a bit of a dumping ground. As I spin up new projects, I simply create a new notebook for it.
For smaller projects, similar to Ryan — I use something.. Smaller!
I have a section group which then has sections for each project.
For private/sensitive projects — OneNote can also password-protect sections (but not section groups or notebooks — oddly). Just don’t lose the password — it’s non-recoverable!
Concepts
Within my “Commonplace” notebook — which is my general “catch-all” for knowledge — I have several sections including (but of course not limited to):
- Productivity — I’m a huge productivity nerd, so I keep links to methods, products, tools, apps, guides, books, concepts etc.
- Hacking — Writing code for a living requires knowledge of a lot of concepts, and then the tools, libraries, patterns and practices to make that happen.
- Quotes — It’s important to save these! I check this section daily for inspiration, guidance or just a smile.
- Travel — What was the carry-on restrictions for that airline again? What was the best website to search for hotels? Travel insurance provider?
- “Warrior Spirit” — Quotes, practices, mantras and rituals of warrior races and people that help me to strong and focused.
This translates into a notebook with sections like so:
Naturally, if you have “related” sections, you can group them via a section group.
Datum
Ryan uses index cards for each “thing of note”. We’ll do similar and use pages.
Once you come across a “thing” of note, simply add a new page.
These pages might contain a single line, or it could be more complex. The beauty of OneNote is that I can put anything (text, photos, images, links, videos etc). This is a big #WIN for me — you can make things nice and interactive if you wish to.
For example, in my “Warrior Spirit” section, I have a page for “The Litany Against Fear”:
I also have the “operation of the machine” speech from Mario Savio in there. Can I ever remember it was given on the steps Sproul Hall? No! But my commonplace does:
Emergent organisation
I find that often natural groups start to emerge in my commonplace, so I also use subpages to organise them. This means I get the “best-of-both” — I get a sense of hierarchy within concepts, while maintaining the “looseness” and granularity of small “cards/pages” for the individual things.
For example, in my “Hacking” section, I have:
I find this lends itself well, as you’ll end up wanting to attach notes to each.
For example, in the “BDD” page, I have links to general information about “Behaviour Driven Development”, while the “SpecFlow” page has specific links/information to how to “do it right” within SpecFlow.
It’s really easy to organise this via cut/copy/paste etc. It allows me to not stress about how/where things are organised and let granularity/abstractions emerge naturally as I build things up.
Sourcing information
Ryan hit the nail on the head — read widely. I buy into Seth Godin’s advice of (paraphrasing wildly) “if you skim a book in a bookstore and find one paragraph useful/inspirational — buy the book”. Books are a phenomenal return on investment — you’re often paying less than £20 for years of experience.
Journal — I keep a daily journal (also in OneNote), it’s messy and just quick notes. At the end of the day, I review my journal to see what I’ve come across that I feel should be committed to “memory”. It might be a book recommendation or a web comic that makes me laugh.
Google for the Source(s) — Seems silly saying this, but it’s amazing how often I witness people see/hear something that they like/appreciate and then never take a moment to dig just one step further to get the source and commit it to memory. My Journal leads to this every single day. It helps build a quality commonplace.
Keeping the information flowing
Like most systems — the key is to keeping them running smoothly. If the process of keeping a commonplace is cumbersome/awkward, it will fall by the wayside.
Here’s some tips to help you build a commonplace that works and is sustainable.
Polish, not perfection
Throw stuff in there quickly. Don’t worry about formatting, links etc. When you come back to things later, you can always add them. What’s important is getting stuff in to begin with.
Search is king
If you can’t find stuff in your commonplace quickly, it’s going to lose some of it’s power. I’ve been in meetings and thought “I have a thing for this”. A quick “Search” (CTRL+E) and I type one to two words and it’s there.
Keep things small
When I first started, I was using long pages for concepts — keep things small and let hierarchies evolve naturally as you add things. It’s easier to move small things around and group them, than having to split big things up.
Duplicate information
There’s always a part of me that feels weird duplicating information. But keeping things small means it’s easy to copy pages to related sections and edit to add/remove context.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts!
OneNote has a lot of keyboard shortcuts — but here’s the key ones I use for commonplace usage:
CTRL+E — Search — Type in “commonplace”, I’m in my notebook. “Hacking” and I’m in my section. Enter other terms and you’re on the page. I’ve found OneNote’s search function to beat the hell out of the competition (e.g. Evernote).
CTRL+N — Add a new page to the current section.
CTRL+ALT+M — Move or Copy a page. What’s great is you can just start typing the section name and hit ALT+M (move) or ALT+C (copy) and you’re done.
CTRL+SHIFT+A — Select the current page in the group (if you have a hierarchy with subpages). Great if you want to add/remove from the hierarchy (see below).
CTRL+ALT+[ or ] — With the page selected (see above), decrease or increase it’s indent respectively.
Over to you…
There you have it — how I store everything! Why don’t you get started building your commonplace today?
Finally, a big thanks to Ryan Holiday for the huge inspiration that got me to this point — and of course Office 365 for OneNote!
