It’s one thing to have a commonplace book but it sucks when you can’t find what you are looking for. Sure you know you got some amazing quote from a book and you need to use the quote now but you thumb through your commonplace book and nothing. If you have an index, it would be easier to find what you want. This leads to another reason why I love Evernote. It makes it super easy to search and you create notebooks and stacks of notebooks which means you can find things a lot easier. In fact, I have a notebook called “Ideas Live Here” so I know if I want an idea all I have to do is go through that notebook. Once the idea has come to life, it’s taken out of that note.
A commonplace book is essential and we should all have one. It’s essentially a journal. A place where you put in what I love to call “all of the things”. Commonplace books 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. I use Evernote as my handwriting could do with some work but it is simple to use and there is a free version. But really any note app would do. The idea is to write in things that are important to you and go back often to learn.
PROMPT: What things will you write in your commonplace book?
Testing ideas will lead you to discover which ideas just might not work the way you’d love them to. Now that doesn’t mean you should throw the idea away. Nope, store it because you never know when you might need that idea and when it just might be the right fit to complete a project.
When you have an idea, it just lives in your head until you actually do something about it. The first thing you should do, I believe, is testing it. Try it out and see how things work. It might not work as you thought it would, it might even work better than thought. However, till you test it out, you won’t know so once you’ve played around with the idea enough in your head, bring it to fruition by testing it.