setting parameters
Some of us are “go with the flow” people. We figure things out as we go without a big preplanning session.
And some of us are all about “rules and guidelines.” We work well when we know the expectations and feel a degree of accountability. We like to have a plan in place and plan ahead.
If you are a “go with the flow” person, feel free to skip this lesson. Fill your book(s) as you are so moved.
If you prefer to have a plan before you start, this lesson is for you!
setting parameters video
This lesson is titled “Setting Paramaters”
We are going to talk about setting parameters (or guidelines and boundaries) for what goes inside your book,
We are going to talk about if you’d like to use one book or more than one book.
And then we will look at the way you will organize your information.
The first step might be learning what kind of information you want to keep in your common place book. While this might develop or change over time, I think we all know ourselves well enough to have a pretty good idea when we start.
Quotes our kids say
What are the words or memories you want to keep or are already keeping? Are you an avid reader who likes to refer back to quotes from books? Are you someone who keeps and tracks personal or professional goals on a regular basis? Do you like to keep a diary? Are you working on a specific project that you’d like to track? Do you often get moved by song lyrics or poems?
Again, this might change over time, but most of us generally know what words are most meaningful to us - either in a practical sense (goals or a project) or from a more emotional or sentimental standpoint.
Once you have a sense of what you will be writing in your book, you need to decide how you will keep that information. Are you okay with your goals living alongside a diary entry? Would it bother you to have more practical information on the same page as a poem or quote?
This is where the idea of more than one book comes into play.
I’ve heard criticism that because commonplace books are meant to be the catch all, if you have more than one book, they are really just journals. And if that’s where you land, I can understand your point of view.
But I’m going to push back against that opinion. A commonplace book is a place to hold text from a variety of sources with the common theme being YOU. There is nothing in that definition that says anything about the theme of the book or that it needs to cover every topic from your life.
I think that you can have multiple commonplace books - each with their own focus.
For example you could have one focused on your faith - with words from hymns or worship songs, sermon notes, prayers, and Bible verses. They are all faith related, but they come from different sources.
Another example would be a book of quotes. Quotes come from various sources - maybe something you saw on social media, something you read in a book, a quote on the front of a greeting card. Wherever. They come from different sources, but with the common theme of being quotes that had an impact on you. So again, you could have a commonplace book that’s focused on keeping quotes and not a list of your current favorite songs or a journal entry about how you’re feeling.
So this is, of course, all up to you and what feels right or makes sense to you.
What I do is kind of a combination. I currently keep a “mix it all up” kind of commonplace book. I fill about one a year and just always have a current book that kind of jumbles all of the things together.
But I also have a book specific to quotes (primarily from books, but sometimes from other sources) and, in the past, I’ve had a commonplace book focused on my faith. Usually things fall into one book or the other, but every now and then there is something that I will add to both my current “everything” book as well as my quote book.
AND FINALLY we need to talk about organization.
This is again a personal decision and you will have to decide what works best for you.
If the idea of having multiple books feels like too much for you, but you also don’t like the idea of your entries being all mixed together, you can sort your commonplace book by theme. Add a few dividers and dedicate one section to each topic that you want to include.
Another option is making an index. If you’re familiar with Bullet Journaling, you can steal their indexing plan by leaving a few pages at the front of your book for an index, numbering your pages, and then indexing your different kinds of entries on those first pages.
Or, you can do what I do which is to simply start at the front of the book and move through it filling it as I find things and not worrying about the order or placement. It does make it harder to find a particular piece of information sometimes, but I’m okay with that. And maybe, you would be too.
Make a plan
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