I can't remember where I first came across the idea of a commonplace book, but I think it was in The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson. It turns out all these guys, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Bacon, W.H. Auden, and more kept what I like to describe as a "paper Evernote." As they went through life, they'd find all these beautiful and strange things they wanted to keep track of, knowing their brains were a poor excuse for a place to put things for safe keeping.
I began using Evernote heavily in 2013 to create my own commonplace book. I keep quotes, journal entires, art, poems, recipes, notes on podcasts, and just about everything there. As a result, I've found I've been able to develop a much more encyclopedic memory. This is helpful for practical things like remembering links to great articles, but it also has an enormous emotional capability to transport me back to certain moments. Journaling, for example, in absolute detail down to the color, smell, and patterns of certain moments like a family vacation or my last day at a company I started give me the ability to empathize with past versions of me in ways that help me understand the me of that moment.
In 2017, I decided to start publishing a piece of my commonplace book here on GitHub. I pooled together all my thinking themes, big events, media (books, articles, tweets, podcasts, youtube videos), a count of my writing, and shoutouts to people I was thankful for.
In 2018, I added a huge end-of-year reflection. I read every single journal entry from the year (74 with about 750 words each), and I took notes on the themes. It turned out I was writing about ~15 things all year. I wrote an essay on one of them, confidence. I added new sections for the new habits I developed, playlists I found and made, and the apps I found myself using a lot.
In 2019, I added quite a few new sections. It was a big year, as Kate and I began to date. We shipped our first books at Holloway, I read a ton of fiction, and I finished my first book.
In 2020 … well, 2020 has been unusual. COVID-19 hit, I left Holloway, wildfires blanketed San Francisco with smoke for much of the year, I began a new career as a coach, and much more.