Creators of commonplace books range from English philosopher John Locke to modern day writers such a Ryan Holiday.

A second brain is a commonplace book for the digital age, it is a personal knowledge management system that you use to capture all your important notes and thoughts so they can be later retrieved.Ĭommonplace books have a long history of being used by the world’s greatest minds to record vital information, quotes, notes, and thoughts that can be later retrieved. This is exactly what I was inspired to do after reading Tiago Forte’s excellent book Building a Second Brain. For the record I use OneNote, but any note taking app with a powerful search functionality works.

My book highlights would be easy to retrieve and available to me with only a quick search and I wouldn’t have to remember the particular book the information was originally found in. But I tried that, and it turns out that Aristotle had a lot to say about friendship and finding the specific bit of information I was looking for needed more than a quick search.īut what if after having read a book, I had taken the time to copy my highlights and notes from my Kindle and into my notetaking system. Some might say, ‘just do a Google search’. This involved me having to look through several possible books I’d read in the last 12 months. Eventually, mostly due to luck I rediscovered my highlights in Massimo Pigiliucci’s book How to be a Stoic. Unfortunately, I could not remember the details of what those categories were and where I had read about them. I knew I had read somewhere that he had divided friendship into three categories. Recently I attempted to recall the three tiers of friendship named by Aristotle.

Printing kindle book notes