#commonplace system

I was testing out what my current system looks like on a white background and i do like it but as far as instagram engagement goes it doesn’t do well 😭 so i guess its back to my other background but enjoy the rest of the pictures i took for my commonplace section!

What is Your Personal Table of Contents? Date:

05/28/2014

Author:Doug Toft

Much of my work consists of helping clients create a table of contents for a book they’d like to write. This is essential work. Lately, though, I’ve concluded that our primary task is to think bigger.

Consider that people who write nonfiction books are now called to become idea entrepreneurs. This involves connecting with a critical mass of people who will embrace and embody your ideas (the non-spammy meaning of having a platform).

On a practical level, this means expressing your ideas in multiple formats. Yes, you’ll write your book. But you’ll also create blog posts and presentations as well. You’ll probably also take part in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Perhaps you’ll also do webinars, publish an email newsletter, and play with video and podcasts. And at some point, you’re likely to consider doing another book.

This sounds like a lot of work. But there’s an opportunity as well. Since your job is to continuously develop and present ideas, why not create a single roadmap for all your ideas in all their expressions? This is more than a table of contents for a single book. It’s a table of contents for all the books you’d like to write—and all the other content you’ll publish and present over the whole arc of your career.

I don’t have an official name for this roadmap yet. For now, let’s call it your personal table of contents.

For example, Patrick Carnes is a psychologist, author, and speaker who developed a thirty-task model of recovery from addiction. This is the big picture of all the work that he wants to put out into the world. He’s already published books that cover many of these tasks in detail. Future books are planned about the rest.

The beauty of the personal table of contents is that it becomes a single, big bank of ideas from which you can “withdraw” content as needed for the book, article, update, or presentation that’s on your plate right now.

After all, why re-invent the wheel every time you sit down to create a piece of content? Instead, zero in on a single, small section of your personal table of contents. Then flesh it out with something from your ongoing collection of supporting material (facts, anecdotes, and quotes in your commonplace book).

For me, the whole idea of a personal table of contents is a new idea that’s just starting to come into focus. Stay tuned for more updates.

(via How a Commonplace Book Differs From a Journal)

How a Commonplace Book Differs From a Journal Date:

07/05/2016

Author:

Doug Toft

A friend asked me about the difference between keeping a journal and keeping a commonplace book: “Aren’t they two words for the same thing?”

At the moment I didn’t have a good answer. Then I stumbled on to a website from the University of Chicago about the history of books. There I found a page about Commonplace Thinking with this passage:

A commonplace book is at once a book form and a method of reading. Commonplacing was a system of using books in which readers digested the books they read by extracting, ordering and recording particular phrases or passages in notebooks of their own. This process encouraged readers to atomize books by isolating units that might later be useful in one or another discursive context….

This gets to the heart of the distinction between a journal and a commonplace book. I see three activities that a commonplace book emphasizes more.

A commonplace book preserves the best of your reading

Think back to the times when books were not widely available, and when libraries were few. When people did manage to get their hands on a book, it was truly an event.

To aid their memory, people copied out—by hand—their favorite passages from an author into a blank, bound set of papers. This served as a portable mini-library to savor at any moment.

This is how commonplace books began. And it’s still a powerful application of the concept. When filled with quotations—the “greatest hits” from the your favorite authors—a commonplace book distills all your reading into a single, personally-curated collection.

A commonplace book promotes creative thinking

The beautiful thing about a collection of quotations is that you can read them in any order and move them around.

Each individual quotation is an “atom” of thought. When you collect quotations from several books by different authors on the same topic, you see these atoms in a broader context. Your individual way of combining them can lead to new insights.

In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler referred this way of thinking as bisociation. For him, it was the essence of creativity.

A commonplace book is a step toward making ideas public

Commonplace books are more output-oriented and outward-facing than journals. They’re used to create things that go out into the world, such as:

Articles, blog posts, books, and other publications (literally, ideas made public)

Services based on the exchange of information, such as training, consulting, and coaching

Businesses and other organizations that are closely tied to a mission