Hi friend,

Here you will find everything I have published online about commonplacing.

What is a commonplace?

A commonplace is an all-encompassing system that lets you for store the things you learn, build an archive over your work, and make readily available the information you need in your work. It’s particularly useful for thinkers and creatives.

Commonplacing is best way I have found to become a better thinker and organize my life.

It was a big thing among the top intellectuals to create a commonplace book during the Renaissance. Everyone from Francis Bacon, to Erasmus, and Napoleon did it. However, the tradition of Commonplacing goes back longer than that. One of the first people in history to mention commonplacing was Seneca (the Younger). He recommended it for becoming better at synthesizing the information we learn:

We ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us…. our natural gifts, we should blend these flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came….

You can read all my articles about commonplacing here:

• How to Keep a Commonplace
• Should You Have a Physical or a Digital Commonplace?
• Rose’s Archives, Darwin’s Secrets, and Sandquist’s Patterns
• How to Keep a Review File (your best learning material)
• Create an Information Repository (and stop stuffing your head with trivialities)
• The Top 3 Ways to Store Information (Stages of Learning)
• How I Used Windows OneNote for the first 2 Years of My Commonplace
• 4 Famous Commonplaces (Rockefeller, Clinton, Onassis, Reagan)

And my master post on the 6 fundamentals of commonplacing.

-Ludvig

P.S: If I write more about commonplacing I will add it here. You may wish to bookmark the page for future use.