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Supercharge Your Life With a Notion Commonplace Book

How to effectively extract and organize what you read for immediate reference and use

God help us if we lose our notecards to a fire.

We all have ways of organizing what we read — notecards, digital word documents, Evernote tables, Notion databases, etc. I propose a super-charged way of organizing what you read and extract — from books, articles, and anything else you consume — using Notion. Why Notion? It’s more efficient and effective.

Early disclaimer: if you don’t have experience using Notion at all, I recommend familiarizing yourself with it by watching a few YouTube videos , specifically on building basic databases, relations, and rollups. Notion geeks, you know what I’m talking about.

On to the meat and potatoes.

It’s a note-taking and project management software that lets you do a lot of magical things.

After using Evernote for a while (since August 2011 to be exact), I started researching other ways to organize and complete projects. Something with Evernote was just lacking.

So, I started looking for other digital tools and came across Notion. I watched YouTube videos on what this software was about and how to use it. The learning curve seemed huge at first, but like anything, the unfamiliar gradually became familiar and comfortable, and so was the case with Notion.

Boy was I in for a surprise. Compared with Evernote, Notion beats it by a thousand ways when it comes to organizing. You can create databases with multiple customized filters.

I won’t get too bogged down on the details but suffice it to say that it’s an excellent tool for storing your Commonplace Book, which brings me to my next point.

A commonplace book is the equivalent of a file cabinet with different category names for different folders and sub-folders.

It’s where you store what you find relevant and interesting. It’s truly your life’s dearest possessions.

It’s what you put inside from the information you consume — books, articles, videos, tweets, and every other medium that feeds you information that’s interesting and relevant to you. It could be quotes, takeaways, stories, or mere impressions.

The point is that you’d be wise to have one if you don’t. Whether you’re an aspiring author, practicing civil engineer, or college student, your commonplace book is your recourse to nuggets that will help you in life.

You don’t want to just read something, store it in some word document, have no cross-references to it, and forget about it. You want to apply what you read, otherwise, why read something if it’s not helping you in some way?

Some use a physical notecard system with categories and put them in plastic bins or boxes.

I use Notion because it’s efficient and effective. This is what it looks like.

You’ll need to create three databases.

You can see the properties I use in the below screenshot:

Properties I use for this database:

The first three properties are self-explanatory.

Below is a sampling of the topics I have in my commonplace book, aka Knowledge Vault.

Properties I mainly use for this database:

As you can see, there are not that many properties because you want your topics to work just like plastic bins with notecards in them. Simple and succinct.

Step 1. Read, highlight, and mark up. Have a conversation with the book.

Step 2. Upon completion of book, let it sit for a couple of days.

Step 3. Come back to whatever you read and start reviewing your highlights and markups, page by page.

Extract as you review the things that stand out to you and input into your Notes & Ideas Notion database.

When you come across a nugget, simply open the Notes & Ideas Vault, create a note and fill in the properties. Make sure to complete all properties so that it properly logs the information in the correct commonplace book topic.

The extraction process can be tedious. It’s a long, slow process, but it exercises the brain and helps retain what you read better.

I stopped using Kindle because I want to reduce screen time since I’m always in front of a screen at work, but also because there’s something beautiful about holding a book, smelling it, and marking it up.

Use “theme” tags: what are main themes that are highlighted by the thing being extracted, e.g., desire, time, obstacles, fear, habits, etc.

Use “type” tags:

Step 4. Tag your notes into its proper topic in your commonplace book by completing the property in the note. It could be philosophy, psychology, personal, finance, etc.

When you open a commonplace book topic, you’ll be able to see all the notes you created that are linked to that topic with all your filters. Here’s a small snippet of what that looks like:

And that’s it. When you are reading so many books across various disciplines and you’re trying to create things, writings, ideas, books, products, presentations, this really comes in handy.

It will save you time in the long run.

Yes, by writing everything out on notecards you exercise the brain and work to better retain the stuff you read, and you’re not looking at a screen.

Now, let’s look at the pros.

Bottom line. Whatever you do, have a system to store what you read so you can quickly reference it when you need it, and don’t store what you extract in a vacuum. You need a way to cross-reference it into themes, to make sense of things. Otherwise, the information is useless.

Carlos is an attorney and part-time Army JAG, Judoka, and Aikido black belt.

The Stock Market

Supercharge Your Life With a Notion Commonplace Book

How to effectively extract and organize what you read for immediate reference and use

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