Index Cards And Notebooks: Hold On To Useful Quotes, Ideas and Insights

Valerie Jégo Marsh
6 min readAug 16, 2022

Remember and organize useful information and ideas before they’re gone! You think you’ll remember, but with 1000s of things coming at you every day, you won’t.

Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

For centuries, bright minds and educated people have kept commonplace books where they would note quotes, observations, musings, anecdotes or bits of conversations from books, poems, songs, letters, newspapers and magazines. Today we might add movies, podcasts and social media.

Although traditionally, people had a devoted commonplace book, nowadays, you could insert all these tidbits in your daily journal, a separate notebook, on your smartphone or index cards. It does make sense to use technology as it is easier to organize and re-organize items in topics and folders. Please feel free to adapt the idea to suit you. Notebooks and index cards have the advantage of working without an internet connection and they don’t run out of battery. Of course, a mix of both could be the perfect solution.

Why Keep a Modern Version Of a Commonplace Book?

Have you ever come across a quote that really spoke to you while scrolling on social media, liked it and completely forgot about it? Maybe you saw it a year later, had the same aha moment and wished you had used it back then…

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Valerie Jégo Marsh

Loves ☕️ 📚🖋 🎨 🧘🏻‍♀️ A Parisian forced into exile in London for preferring tea to coffee😉🇫🇷🇬🇧 https://valeriejegomarsh.medium.com/membershi