How I make my Common Place Book

Many years ago I had a home organization notebook that I took with me that had our meal plans, schedules, and a few other things, but I ended up also having another notebook for sermon notes, and another for planning some homeschool stuff, and I got pretty tired of that. I kept reading about commonplace books in some of the classic literature I read, and the idea intrigued me, and I started making my own. Then I started getting comments from people about it, and I thought, I should probably tell how I make my commonplace book, so people can know.

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What is a commonplace book?

It’s a book that is a commonplace for all the things you need.

Yes, it’s a little obvious, I know.

But, in there I keep my grocery list, sermon notes, notes for history lessons, or literary guides, and my habit trackers. Basically, anything I need to write down goes in there.

What do you need for a commonplace book?

Now, I’m going to tell you what I put in mine, obviously, my needs will be different from yours, but some of this will transfer over to what you need.

Things I purchased: composition notebook, post-it tabs, 6×9 manila envelope, gluesticks

Things I print out: calendar, monthly notebooks (if you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER you’ll get a coupon to get this free as part of the welcome series), Bible curriculum syllabus, reading challenge I joined this year

Commonplace book prep

Once I have everything gathered together, I cut out all of the various items to better fit in the notebook, and make good use of my space.

Then I start the tedious job of numbering the pages and creating a table of contents at the front. Usually, I’ll do this while watching TV or something else. This time I was taking pictures so I listened to a podcast.

I trim down the calendar page, carefully cutting off the month title to use to label where the month starts, and trimming down the habit tracker/reading tracker page to fit.

I glue these in, turn to the table of contents, and write the month in black. I’ve color-coded my notebooks, I don’t know why I decided this was necessary, but I did.

I then take the month title and glue it on the edge of the page to create a tab, I guess I could just use a Post-it tab, but I started doing this. I cover it in packing tape and it becomes fairly solid. In my years of doing this, none of those tabs have ever torn off.

Then I take all of those other things I cut out and start gluing them into the book. I’m working on some Bible studies for my Sunday School class, so I glue the next one I’m working on into the book and write down what page it is on over in the table of contents.

I put a Post-it tab up on top of the notebook and wrote the word Bible on it. This gives me an easy way to turn back here that isn’t permanent, because I’ll finish off this particular portion before I finish the notebook, and I’ll glue the next one in there. This is written in red ink. Red is my favorite color, so the Bible is red.

I don’t have a tab for the reading challenge, but I glue it in and write down the page number on the table of contents. This is written in blue, I don’t know why I decided reading is blue, but it is. You’ll notice all reading posts on my blog have blue words and blue in the pictures. You’ll notice similar for Bible posts.

I have another tab for the book I’m working to create a literature guide for, I’ll also make a small table of contents for this topic, so I don’t have to write it on the big one each time I start again.

On the back I glue the 6×9 manila envelope to hold any pieces of paper I want for later. Right now that means the next section of the curriculum I’ll be working on, but when I was making a monthly notebook for the kids, I had the rest of the weeks for the month in there.

I kind of miss having that because it was helpful for me to keep things straight.

So, that’s my commonplace book. I quite like it, and find it very helpful.

How I use my commonplace book

Basically I write everything in it.

I write my grocery list, and stick a tab on top saying “this week.”

I write my sermon notes in here.

Notes from any classes I take.

History notes and questions back when I was writing our history curriculum.

Right now I’m working on a literary guide for Best Christmas Pageant Ever, so I’ve got that in here with a tab.

Random quote from a book I found cool. All the stuff goes in there, and it keeps me so much more organized now.