One book to rule them all

One book to...

…contain all my random thoughts and notes and ideas and plans for world domination*?

Apparently, according to the first page in this rather lovely book I bought late December 2022, this is exactly what I was going to last year.

It’s a shame I forgot all about that post-it note, because it might’ve saved a lot of the hand-wringing over the Twixtmas break wondering what to do with all the loose little scraps of paper and sheafs of notes on my desk, all containing Important Thoughts and Information, but with no obvious home to be tidied into. I really, really did need to deal with them, because Tidy My Desk had been on my To Do list since forever and I was getting rather bored of it being a thing and didn’t want to carry it into the new year.

Quietly shuffling that heap of randomness still-to-be-sorted to one side, let’s talk about this One Book idea, that I think - if actually implemented - would save me from finding myself back here again later this year.

Commonplace books

The sort of book I have in mind going forward is often called a Commonplace Book. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective.

There’s good precedent for using one. The boy Leonardo himself had…

A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat.

Leonardo da Vinci

I don’t make a habit of reading anything by Joanne Harris (which I find curiously incongruent, as I (a) love France and (b) like food - but (c) I don’t particularly like her writing, sorry) but I did fall in love with the book described in her novel Five Quarters of the Orange - part recipe book, part scrap book, interspersed with mysterious and cryptic notes made by the protagonist’s mother.

I love the idea of creating a big, bulging book stuffed with secrets, notes-to-self, quotes from the great and good, all mixed in with recipes for those little things I only need once a year, like cranberry sauce and elderflower cordial.

Photo by Xiaolong Wong on Unsplash

But would digital work better?

If you start looking into this for how it could work in practice, you swiftly come across ‘people’ who put all this stuff into digital form. It’s another world over in Second Brain land. Tempting talk, true…it would solve the paper clutter, but not so fast.

For useful and possibly important but not life-changing information, such as instructions, handouts and receipts, digital filing makes sense. I’m trying to remember to save random little notes, useful links, worksheets and suchlike to Notion (or Evernote, choose your poison) rather than keep a copy in my computer files. But if my desk is covered in heaps of paper, my digital filing system isn’t much better: once I’ve filed something, I find it very hard to remember it even exists. It’s also a bit pointless to keep these things after the point of usefulness - and tech changes so fast that instructions go out of date.

There’s something oh-so-satisfying about a real and tangible book

There’s science behind it, too. Research has shown that when we write by hand, on a paper surface, we retain information better than when we type it. And if you’re an artist-type, then you’re most definitely a visual person - and may even have a photographic memory, like me. You may also find that once you’ve written something on a page, you can visualise the page you’ve written on and whereabouts on the page, too. I’m the same with reading, which is why I struggle to get on with my Kindle. Probably just as well, given my temptations around collecting books - and there’s evidence I’m not the only one who finds e-books harder to remember.

That same article contains this damning phrase, debunking the notion (see what I did there) of keeping a digital second brain vs a commonplace book:

Evernote is not memory; it’s creating an archive. You are not on your way to knowing these lines by heart—as poetry lovers have done for centuries, and human culture was built upon...

It doesn’t have to be a plain old notebook though

Sometime last year, I started to use a sketchbook as a place to store some of my notes and things-to-remember. It’s quite fun, and I definitely remember more of these little details from recording them on pages like these, but ultimately this project has stalled as the pages are too time-consuming to create, and consideration needs to be given for how to add the text to a painted page. All of which leads to heaps, as the backlog of notes to write up grows.

Another obvious limitation of this sort of book is it doesn’t lend itself to notetaking on the hoof: scribbling down a quote you hear, a book that’s mentioned, an interesting titbit from a webinar or podcast, the sort of thing you want to jot down before you forget, but don’t necessarily need to keep for all time. I have a whole drawer stuffed with old printer paper, only printed on one side - it’s too quick and easy to grab a sheet.

The big book I mentioned at the start showed promise, but ultimately failed, for several reasons:

1. It didn’t fold back on itself (like a spiral-bound would do) so took up too much room on a small, somewhat cluttered desk.

2. It was too 'nice’ to use for those everyday random scribblings 🙄

3. I knew at the back of my mind I wouldn’t need all of the contents forever - so why write any of them in a nice book anyway?

4. Even if I did fill it, where to store it, after it was full? It’s a bit unwieldy, being A4 - not the sort of book you’d carry around with you, or flick through on an idle afternoon.

5. Eventually, it ceased to be used and I forgot it existed, regressing to scraps of printer paper and post-it notes.

It also highlights another bottleneck in this business of information management: not all notes are to be kept for posterity, some are more timely things: scribbles of things to do, emails to reply to, things for the diary.

Enter, stage left: a bullet journal

Some people like to use a bullet journal as their One Book. Indeed, I was such a person. Exhibit A:

I find this double-page spread particularly useful:

But again - what to do with the damn thing once it’s full? I want to keep the notes, there’s some good ideas in there (see above). But do I need to keep the record of my To List from June 2016? Not really.

These days, I never make it past mid-summer with a bullet journal, although that hasn’t stopped me starting up again for 2024. Here's a quick flick-through.

You may give me a wry look and say that in the time it took for me to make it pretty I could’ve actually done some of the things on my to-do list, but I don’t care: I’ve concluded that making things colourful and fun (Snoopy!) engages my attention, and makes it less of a chore to open it up and work out what I’m supposed to be doing. I also enjoyed an hour or so of much-needed blissful flow, playing with my Posca pens and washi tape. Who knows, I might even do some of the things I’ve planned in there. The tick boxes are fun to colour in at least.

And I have actually done some art and coloured in my little time-logging boxes to say I did so… (more on this WIP piece below next time - and I’ll pop some pics on Insta).

In conclusion, here is

Izzy’s System for Data Wrangling in 2024

Temporary

• Spiral bound A4 notebook open on desk OR old printer papers. Yet to be decided. There’s tons of the latter to be used up but the notebook is tidier and there’s always the recycling bin for the paper…unless I spiral bind the old papers…hmmm..

• Reminders and Notes apps for capturing stuff when I’m away from my desk.

• Digital calendar for absolute, definitely happening stuff - not a kind of To-Do wish-list. Classes at the gym get added automatically, and online Flown sessions too, so it makes sense to keep using this and not bother duplicating appointments into my…

• Bullet Journal for weekly and monthly planning and an attempt at time-logging. Easier to see at a glance than digital, and keep open on my desk or move from room to room. Useful for recording random notes about things like when we last ordered coffee, and how long it took for the delivery to arrive from Denmark. Also a useful place to try implementing a habit tracking system of some kind.

• Kanban board to shuffle disposable post-it notes into priority order, instead of a written daily to-do list (which tends to morph into a wish-list with no relationship to reality and time available). I’ve used a Kanban board in emergency pre-holiday-trying-to-finish-it-all situations and it works well. I have more to say on my particular Kanban board another time! Possibly more exciting than it sounds…

• Notion for a digital place to put links to check out, things to read, how-tos for website etc. All the things that can easily be deleted when I don’t need them anymore. For reasons (see the digital vs tangible argument above) I definitely won’t be using this as a Commonplace Book for longer-term storage, or a Zettelkasten system for idea wrangling as others may do. If you don’t know what Zettelkasten is, click this link at your peril, it might make you cry.

• Digital recipe keeper has already been deployed and it’s an absolute game-changer. You could say this is permanent, but as it’s digital, it’s not really real, is it? Somewhere in-between? Nevertheless, I’ve slowly been adding recipes from the heaps of cuttings and clippings. I love it for so many reasons, I may talk about another time - or ask me in the comments, I’m happy to share! This is the one I’ve been using, there are others.

Permanent

• Commonplace book to write up the best bits, the things I want to keep indefinitely. I’ll have to put in the time to go through the weekly scribbled notes to find what those best bits are, and I admit that’s a potential sticking point. BUT I’m hoping the act of looking through then writing things twice will act as a kind of edit and filter in deciding what deserves to be remembered. The exact book is yet to be chosen, but I will shop my own stash of empty A5 books…it will be plain paper, not dotty, or ruled, ugh. Might be Moleskine, I’ll see what I have.

Et voilà!

One Book. No heaps. No scraps.

I’ve said it, so now I’ll have to stick with it. I’ve partly written this post to remind me of my intentions, but I hope it might be useful to you, too, if you struggle with the Heaps.

NB Sketchbooks are definitely not data wrangling, but art journals might be. Either way, I’ll leave them for another time.

What are your plans for world domination in 2024 and where will you keep yours?!

PS I accept this might all seem a bit much, especially if you’re someone who’s got their sh1t together, but please don’t say I’m overthinking 🥹 It’s precisely because I want to eliminate thinking about “what to do with this titbit of information” that I need a pre-thought-out system!

*a fun little Christmas present to myself…