I believe I have mentioned before that I find a topic, obsess over it for a while, then totally forget about it.
Right now, it is Baldur’s Gate 3.
I bought the game right after it came out, along with a Steam Deck, played for about three weeks, and then my Steam Deck sat untouched until about a year ago. So obviously, now that I am obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3 again, I started playing it on my PC instead. The Steam Deck is busy with my other game.
I have been reading the D&D Player’s Handbook for the past week so I can get a better idea of how to set up my character in BG3. I also bought Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide because there is some lore I am lacking.
Have my notes evolved into yet another commonplace book? You bet they have.
In a week or two, I will probably be able to rattle off any number of feats, backgrounds, classes, and spells. In two months, I will be focused on something else entirely. It’s just how it is with me.
This is, of course, happening right after I bought a new desk with about twice as much real estate as the old one. My monitor is pretty big, so before, there wasn’t room for much besides a keyboard and mouse.
Naturally, I am already covering the new desk.
I started more Jewish studies, so that notebook is sitting on top of the related binder and my current book. Then there is my garden compendium. I 3D printed two desk organizers. Of course I also had to make room for my cat Post-It dispenser.
And more pens. Always more pens.
I also have a hankering to make some notebooks, but I am waiting on a Teflon bone folder, which should arrive tomorrow. Given the current state of my desk, what I clearly need is more notebooks.
One of the things I’ve realized this year is that I don’t really collect hobbies.
From the outside, it probably looks like I bounce from one thing to another. Gardening. Bookbinding. Norwegian. Citation templates. Herbs. Cocktails. Ancient history.
They’re all over the place.
To me, though, they’re all the same hobby.
I like understanding how things work.
The garden has made that clearer than anything else. Before this year, companion planting was something I’d read about. Soil composition was something I’d heard people discuss. Medicinal herbs were mostly names in books.
Now I get to watch it happen.
I’m seeing why one bed dries out faster than another. Why some plants seem happier next to certain neighbors. Which herbs attract pollinators and which ones don’t. Which vegetables struggle through a heat wave while others barely notice. It’s no longer just biology in a textbook. It’s biology happening in my backyard.
That’s probably why my garden is organized the way it is. It isn’t the most efficient layout, and I’ve certainly spent more time weeding because of it. But separating plants by water needs, companion planting, shade, and other variables lets me see what works and what doesn’t. I’m treating the garden as one giant experiment.
The same thing happens with my other projects.
I didn’t start making notebooks because I thought notebooks were too expensive. I started because I wanted to understand how books are made. Every mistake teaches me something, and every notebook gets a little better than the last.
I originally started learning Norwegian because I had a reason to. Somewhere along the way, though, the language became the reward. I enjoy the grammar, I enjoy listening to it, and I was ridiculously proud of myself for using it in Oslo, even if it was only a little.
The citation bundles might be the clearest example of all. I don’t enjoy formatting bibliographies. I enjoy solving problems, and I kept thinking about how much easier graduate school would have been if I’d had something like this on my desk.
Maybe that’s why all of these projects seem connected to me, even if they don’t to anyone else.
I first learned about commonplace books while reading the second book of A Discovery of Witches. It sounded like such a cool idea.
I immediately found an unused notebook in my inventory and started carrying it around.
I had been told that one simply writes down anything interesting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t finding anything interesting at first, and every time I wrote something down, it felt forced.
A few months ago—maybe a year, time has ceased to have meaning—I started a bullet journal again. Instead of writing down things I needed to do or making trackers, it slowly turned into a commonplace book.
I started devoting entire sections to things I was interested in: four pages on whisky, seven pages on Gàidhlig grammar, and assorted bits of trivia that appealed to me for reasons known only to my brain.
Eventually, I had to start making separate notebooks. I simply had too many interests to fit into one.
As far as I can remember, I currently have notebooks for:
Baseball
Gàidhlig
Norwegian
One for a game I am playing but refuse to admit to publicly
Religious studies
Gardening adventures (which covers enough topics to qualify as several notebooks by itself)
And I still have many blank notebooks waiting to be filled.
So how many notebooks is too many?
Like the question of how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.
I think a lot of us are taught that life follows a fairly straightforward path: go to college right after high school, find a career, and work forty or more hours a week until retirement. I never really followed that plan, and for a long time I felt like I had somehow done life incorrectly.
As I have gotten older, though, I have realized that the things I didn’t do made me different in a way that I actually appreciate. I have always been curious, and I finally feel like I have given myself permission to simply learn things because they interest me.
So these days I find myself learning crafts, bookbinding, languages, gardening, and even some homesteading skills. There is always some new rabbit hole waiting to be explored.
Not always having steady work has certainly been stressful, but it has also taught me that life is about more than giving decades of yourself to an employer who may never appreciate you the way you deserve. There is value in creating things, learning things, and following your curiosity.
At this point, if something sounds interesting, I want to try it. Some people may think that is strange, and perhaps it is. But I enjoy it, and I like the idea of keeping my mind active and open to new experiences.
Maybe I am making up for lost time. Or maybe I am finally becoming the person I was always meant to be.
I hit Norwegian hard before my trip and ultimately got burned out. One thing that came out of it, though, was an idea I really liked: a language-learning compendium.
Obviously, I started with basics like articles, gender, common verbs, and conjugations. But I also wanted to add things that I knew would help me personally.
For example, I struggle with vocabulary recall, especially when I’m nervous. What I ended up doing was asking ChatGPT to give me short readings at my current level. I would write down words I didn’t know, look up their meanings, and add them to the compendium. Writing them down helps force them to stick in my memory.
I write everything in pencil first, then go back over it in pen. Studies have shown that handwriting notes helps retention, and after years of trying different methods, I know that writing things down works better for me than typing.
Right now, I am diving deeper into grammar, like modal verbs, and writing down common phrases and usage notes. I still burn out from time to time, but I am really enjoying the process.
I am also not sure why I am studying so hard, since I keep second-guessing whether I will ever be able to move to Oslo.
But I know myself.
I just can’t stop learning.
Even if other people think what I’m learning is useless.
I used to see a lot of bullet journals on my personal Instagram account and thought they looked amazing. Design your own planner exactly the way you want? Sweet.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that there was an actual method attached to bullet journaling. I hadn’t done much research before trying it myself. I was mostly seeing beautiful spreads online — watercolor paintings, perfectly coordinated weekly layouts, intricate trackers, and pages that looked more like art books than planners.
Very quickly, I started to feel pressure to make mine look like that.
At first, I tried drawing every weekly and monthly spread ahead of time. I do not have the patience for that, so I switched to drawing one or two weeks at a time instead. Then I realized that if I wanted things like my book tracker in the back of the notebook, I would need to plan the entire notebook layout in advance anyway.
I tried using the actual Bullet Journal method at one point and discovered I hated how unfinished it felt. I wanted structure and consistency, not rapid logging and migration. I know that system works wonderfully for some people, but it didn’t work for me.
The Sticker Phase
While I was working on my computer science degree, I had an instructor who was very into planner culture. She showed me her A6 Wonderland222 planner and I immediately fell in love with it. I ordered one myself and quickly became overwhelmed by all the blank space.
This instructor was also very into a particular stationery and planner sticker shop, which I won’t name here because this is not criticism of that creator or her business. She gave me a small card with samples of washi tape, so naturally I visited the shop and bought a ton of things: weekly kits, monthly kits, decorative stickers, functional stickers…if it had cats, books, or cats with books, I bought it.
Then I found another shop and bought even more.
I hit the Black Friday sales hard. I ordered a Chinese New Year advent calendar and opened the entire thing all at once because I lacked the patience to wait.
As it turns out, many of these weekly kits are not designed for A6 planners at all. They are generally made for Hobonichi planners and similar Japanese formats. So I ended up with stickers overlapping into the next day, which drove me absolutely insane. At that point, I decided I hated my A6 planner and swore I would never buy one again.
Naturally, I decided to try bullet journaling again so I could use the stickers there instead.
That also did not work.
I tried using every sticker in the weekly kits because I felt like I needed to justify owning them. The result was cluttered, overwhelming, and honestly kind of ugly. I also experimented with a notebook that used black paper, which sounded cool in theory but quickly became impractical when I realized I couldn’t jot something down without finding a light-colored gel pen first.
The Hobonichi Cousin
After all of that, I bought a Hobonichi Cousin because everyone I followed online swore it was the perfect planner. I liked the idea of having monthly, weekly, and daily pages all in one place. When it arrived, I spent several hours assigning themes to each month and drawing a detailed book tracker in the back. I was ready.
And then I realized that system didn’t work for me either.
The daily pages felt like pressure. I barely touched the monthly spreads. I ignored most of the trackers. I disliked how few blank pages there were, and especially disliked what felt like wasted space: pages about preserving eyesight and address pages I knew I would never use.
People often say the printed ink is light enough that you can simply write over the daily pages if you want to repurpose them. In my experience, that wasn’t true at all. My handwriting competed visually with the printed quotes at the bottom of the page, and I found myself crossing out dates at the top just to make the pages usable.
Everything felt chaotic.
Returning to Structure
Eventually, I tried bullet journaling again — except this time, it slowly stopped being a planner altogether. Instead, it became a commonplace book. Looking back, that is probably what brought me back to keeping commonplace books in the first place.
Ironically, after all of this experimentation, I ended up returning to the A6 Wonderland222 planner.
Why Aesthetic Productivity Didn’t Work for Me
Over time, I realized that my aesthetic simply does not align with what people often associate with planner culture online. What I actually appreciate about the Wonderland222 is that it provides underlying structure without demanding that I use it in a particular way.
I eventually realized that I am creative, but only if there is some structure underneath everything.
For example, I turned some of the undated daily pages into a baseball section where I track my favorite team’s roster, wins and losses, and other notes throughout the season. I even designed my reading tracker to resemble a baseball scorekeeping book.
That creativity came much more naturally once I stopped trying to recreate what looked good online.
In the end, aesthetic productivity simply did not work for me, and that’s okay.
I don’t want organizing my life to feel performative. I’m minimalist by nature, and I eventually realized that I was spending more time trying to create the appearance of organization than actually building systems that supported my life.
At the same time, I know aesthetic productivity genuinely helps some people stay engaged and organized, and I’m glad they’ve found systems that work for them.
Because ultimately, that’s the point of a planner in the first place.
Baseball schedule – a bit messy, but beautiful to me! 🙂
This is not an actual photo of me – credit to ChatGPT for the image generation.
I have spent years feeling inadequate because there is so much I want to learn that I eventually become overwhelmed and end up touching none of it.
At the moment, I am studying four languages. I am still in the phase where my brain immediately reverts to French because it was the first language I learned outside of English.
There are currently four commonplace books in my bag. One of them is completely blank, just in case.
I carry a pen case full of stationery tools I “might need,” along with a Kindle Scribe.
I want to write a dissertation on the Scottish Highlands around the time of Culloden. Or perhaps another period of Highland history. I still cannot decide.
I want to learn to knit so I can make beautiful sweaters and shawls.
I am trying to grow my own food and learn how to can it, partially because gardening fascinates me and partially because apparently some part of my brain is preparing for a zombie apocalypse.
I want to make paper and ink.
I am going to spin my own yarn someday and dye it using plants I have grown myself.
I am designing a planner that actually fits the way I think and work instead of settling for something mass-produced.
I am binding notebooks by hand because it turns out I genuinely enjoy it.
For a long time, all of this made me feel like a failure. I constantly felt behind. Surely, if I were more disciplined, more focused, or more organized, I would already be proficient at half these things.
Eventually, though, I realized something important:
You cannot dedicate your entire life to mastering dozens of subjects simultaneously.
Some seasons of life are for language learning. Some are for gardening. Some are for theology, history, sewing, bookbinding, or note-taking systems.
Some days I spend hours studying Torah. Other days I spend six straight hours documenting Norwegian vocabulary and grammar rules in my learning compendium like a Victorian scholar who has just discovered Scandinavia.
And honestly? That is fine.
I have stopped trying to force myself into becoming a hyper-efficient machine optimized for productivity and mastery at all times.
Now I mostly try to ride the wave of whatever is currently lighting up my brain.
The interests eventually circle back around anyway.
You do not have to learn everything at once.
You just have to stay curious enough to keep returning to the things you love.
There have been several studies showing that people tend to remember information better when they write it down by hand. For me, that has absolutely been true. Hence the ever-growing stack of commonplace books around my house.
One study discussed in Scientific American explains that typing involves repeating the same simple finger movements, while handwriting creates distinct physical motions for each letter. According to Audrey van der Meer, who spearheaded the study, handwriting helps lock the motor and sensory systems together.
I won’t get too deep into the science here. That isn’t my area of expertise. But looking back, I wish I had been able to handwrite more of my notes in law school.
I tried for a week or two. Eventually, though, the professors spoke too quickly for me to keep up effectively by hand. I switched to typing instead, organizing everything neatly in OneNote by class, with individual pages for each topic on the syllabus. My organization system was solid. The problem was retention.
I’m also not the type of person who can compulsively reread notes over and over again. That makes it especially important for me to absorb the material the first time I encounter it, and handwriting seems to help with that.
In high school, we had spelling tests where we memorized vocabulary terms alongside their definitions. During the test, we had to fill in the correct word next to each definition. Because I had physically written the words down beforehand, I could often close my eyes and “see” the page in my head. Even if I couldn’t immediately remember the correct word, I could remember where it had been positioned relative to the others on the list.
That kind of visual and physical memory still seems to matter for me now.
At any rate, I love creating these various and often random commonplace books. I don’t have to learn at someone else’s speed. I can sketch diagrams where needed. I can reorganize information however my brain naturally wants to process it. For me, it’s simply a better system.
The funny thing is that I never really learned how to study. As a child, most schoolwork came easily to me, so no one ever thought I might need actual study strategies later on.
Over the years, I have Googled and browsed Pinterest trying to find the “best” note-taking system. One method that appears constantly is the Cornell Method, where the page is divided into three sections: a narrow left-hand “cue” column for keywords or questions, a larger note-taking section on the right, and a summary section at the bottom.
I tried it a couple of times and never found it especially helpful. Even the research surrounding the method seems somewhat inconclusive.
What I eventually realized is that I don’t need an elaborate system.
I just need something straightforward that works with the way my brain already processes information: plain notebooks, handwritten notes, and room to think.
No fancy handwriting. No planner stickers. Just paper.
And yes, I once asked ChatGPT for note-taking advice. It suggested mind maps.
I practically yelled at the screen.
They look so chaotic to me that I know I would immediately become irritated with my own notes and never look at them again.
Some weekends are for errands. Some are for recovery.
This one feels like a weekend for making things.
I’ll be in the garden, watching baseball, and practicing bookbinding with simple materials.
Nothing glamorous—just the satisfying work of learning by doing.
I ordered cardstock that should arrive tomorrow, and I plan to try Coptic binding for the first time. With luck, I’ll end the weekend with a notebook worthy of gifting to a friend. Realistically, it may take a few attempts—but who’s counting?
I chose black cardstock along with a few shades of gray. Even if the work is simple, it suits my minimalist nature.
There is plenty of gardening to do as well, assuming the weather cooperates. Some starts may be ready for larger containers, which feels like a small victory after I had to replant several when my cat decided to have a snack.
Weeding is inevitable. So far, nothing I direct-sowed has germinated enough to distinguish itself confidently from the weeds.
Baseball is inevitable too.
If I can’t watch, I’ll listen while working outside. If I can watch, I can bind books at the same time. Either way, the game will be part of the weekend rhythm.
When I first wrote about my commonplace book, it was mostly a place to gather notes and ideas. Since then, it has become something much more useful: part reference library, part creative workshop, and part record of what I’m learning now.
Like most good tools, it changed as I changed.
Commonplace books are often used to collect interesting information across many subjects. In my case, that has turned into several notebooks for several passions.
I have one dedicated to Highland culture, where I once half-seriously decided I should write a dissertation. I have another for Torah study and Jewish learning. I even bought matching notebooks for continuity and built a reusable Traveler’s Notebook-style hardcover, which I turned into a replica of River Song’s diary from Doctor Who.
My gardening notebook is one of the most practical. I drew the herbs I planted for easy identification, gave each herb and vegetable its own page with planting instructions and uses, and sketched a not-to-scale map of the garden with beds organized by water needs, height, and invasiveness.
All of this eventually led me to planners.
When I first discovered bullet journaling, planners, and sticker culture, I fell down the rabbit hole and bought far too much. Eventually I realized I am simply too minimalist for that world.
I tried the much-loved Hobonichi Cousin. It had many good features, but the pages felt too busy and included sections I knew I would never use. I looked at other planners and couldn’t justify paying premium prices for branding.
Then I found Wonderland222: clean, functional, and refreshingly minimal.
Even so, it still wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
So now I’m designing my own planner in Scribus. So far I have a daily page template and a calendar spread, but my goal is to arrange monthly, weekly, and daily pages in a way that makes sense to me. I’m also creating a custom baseball tracking section.
I’ll print it myself, bind it myself, and design the cover myself.
If it turns out well, I may even make a few for others someday.
The real lesson in all of this is simple: use what works for you.
Stickers didn’t work for me. Trend-driven planner culture didn’t work for me. Buying things because everyone else loved them didn’t work for me.
What did work was learning my own preferences.
I buy tools I can use for years. I choose quality over clutter. I build systems that support my actual life.
Cèilidh Nam Freumhan 