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The art of keeping a commonplace book

Readers have kept commonplace books for centuries — personal anthologies of passages, quotations, and observations drawn from everything they encountered.

Why slow reading changes how you think

When you read slowly enough to notice language, you begin to internalize the rhythms and structures that good writing uses. Speed is the enemy of retention.

Building a note-taking practice

The goal isn't to capture everything. It's to force yourself to decide what matters, and why.

Choosing your tools wisely

The best tool is the one you'll actually use. Friction is the enemy of consistency — keep your note-taking system as simple as the task demands.

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Most people treat note-taking as a filing system. The ones who get the most from it treat it as a thinking system — a place where ideas collide, combine, and become something new.

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The difference shows up over time. A filing system gives you back exactly what you put in. A thinking system gives you connections you didn't know were there — links between books read years apart, between problems in different domains, between a question you had at twenty and an answer you found at thirty-five.

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A page from Marcus Aurelius' personal notebooks, circa 161–180 CE. One of the earliest surviving examples of private reflective writing.

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The case for writing by hand

Eleanor Marsh · 18 February 2026 · 6 min read

There is something that happens when pen meets paper that doesn't happen when fingers meet keys. The pace changes. Thought slows to the speed of the hand, and in that slowing, something clarifies. You cannot type as fast as you think, but you can write — in the cursive sense — only as fast as you decide.

Cognitive scientists have studied this. Note-takers who write by hand remember more, understand more deeply, and integrate new information more readily than those who type. The prevailing explanation is that handwriting forces encoding — because you can't write fast enough to transcribe, you must summarise, and summarising is understanding in miniature.

What the keyboard took from us

This isn't a polemic against typing. It's an argument for intentional friction — for choosing the tool that matches the purpose. When you need to write fast and accurately, type. When you need to think, consider reaching for the notebook instead.

"The hand is connected to the thinking mind in ways the keyboard is not. Writing by hand is a form of slow thinking made visible."
— Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

The notebook doesn't need a Wi-Fi connection. It doesn't send notifications. It doesn't suggest that you might also enjoy related content. It simply holds what you put into it, and waits.

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Call createNote() to add a new entry, or use archiveNote(id) to move older entries out of the active view.

notes.ts

1 export type Note = { 2 id: string; 3 title: string; 4 body: string; 5 createdAt: Date; 6 } 8 export function createNote(title: string, body: string): Note { 9 return { id: crypto.randomUUID(), title, body, createdAt: new Date() }; 10 }