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.
Back when I had multiple topics in one commonplace book (which sounds horrible now), I had a dedicated section on whisky. I learned about the distillation process, the different types, and the various Scotch-producing regions.
I spent some time learning about the different regions of Scotland because I am very particular about those. Out of my three favorites, two are Highland. One is a blended malt, and one is a single malt. I am surprised that a blended made the list, but you like what you like. My third favorite is a Speyside single malt.
Well, before I get too far into this, my favorites are The Sassenach (Highland), Glenmorangie (Highland), and The Balvenie (Speyside).
The region I never want crossing my lips ever again is Islay (pronounced eye-luh). If I wanted to drink a campfire, I would just put a burned log in my mouth.
So what is peat, anyway? Peat is partially decomposed plant material that has built up in bogs over thousands of years. Some distilleries burn peat during the malting process, and the smoke infuses the barley with those earthy, smoky flavors. That is why many Islay whiskies taste like smoke, campfires, iodine, or even the ocean. Plenty of people absolutely love it. I am not one of those people.
Next came the different types.
Blended malt – A blend of two or more single malt Scotch whiskies from more than one distillery. The Sassenach is produced by Galloway Spirits and is a blended malt.
Single malt – Mashed, fermented, distilled, and matured at a single distillery in Scotland.
Single cask – As the name implies, this whisky comes from one individual barrel. The run is typically very limited, usually around 200–300 bottles. I was lucky enough to find a single-cask Balvenie a few months ago that was absolutely fabulous, and I was sad to see the end of it. Since single-cask releases are limited, this one even came with its own bottle number.
Yesterday, I got my hands on the Harrison Ford Glenmorangie. I have been a fan of Harrison Ford since the early ’80s, and because I also love Scotch, I clearly had to buy this. It was aged in Portuguese red wine casks (I only drink red wine, so that was a bonus), and Mr. Ford asked for more “bite” in this edition. I am not quite sure what that means because I found it very smooth.
I have looked at other types of whisky, of course.
Bourbon must be made in the United States, though it is most commonly associated with Kentucky. It must contain at least 51% corn in the mash bill, be aged in new, charred oak barrels, and be bottled at a minimum of 80 proof.
Irish whiskey must be distilled and aged in Ireland. It is made from cereal grains, aged in wooden casks for at least three years, and bottled at no less than 40% ABV.
Well…those are really the only ones I care about, so I will end with this:
You can spell it “whiskey” or “whisky.” It depends on the country of origin. An interesting rule of thumb I found is that if the country’s name has an “e” in it, the spirit is usually spelled “whiskey.” If it does not, it is usually spelled “whisky.”
I choose “whisky.” I like consistency.
Of course, the best whisky is the one you enjoy, regardless of where it comes from or how anyone else says you should drink it.
Harrison Ford’s whisky is only second to actually having Harrison Ford here.
The garden compendium was originally meant to be a catch-all. It included medicinal herbs with drawings, uses, and recipes; planting, care, and harvest instructions for all of the herbs and vegetables I planted; a diagram of this year’s layout; a planting calendar; and a journal of what I did, what happened, and how I could fix my mistakes.
That plan hasn’t changed. The notebook will continue into next year, or however long it takes me to fill 300 sheets.
What has changed is everything else.
Originally, I wrote herb recipes on the back of each herb page. It didn’t take long to realize that a tincture is a tincture, my handwriting was getting messier, and my fountain pen was ghosting through onto the drawing on the other side. So the recipes are getting their own section, but only for the preparations I’ve actually made with herbs from my own garden. The herb pages themselves will stay as a high-level overview with drawings and uses.
Then there are the medicinal herbs.
I have become fascinated by them and have been researching them like crazy. That rabbit hole is deep enough to fill 300 sheets all by itself, which wasn’t the original purpose of the compendium. I wanted this notebook to be something I could leave behind someday—a record of the garden that my descendants could flip through and (hopefully) ooh and ahhh over.
So, naturally, I’m making another notebook.
Medicinal herbs deserve one of their own. The subject is practically endless, and if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that I’m incapable of leaving well enough alone.
I’ve also started color-coding the page edges. The notebook only came with two ribbon bookmarks, which isn’t nearly enough anymore. By highlighting the edges of each page based on the section—herbs, vegetables, diagrams, journal entries, and so on—I can find what I’m looking for without even opening the book.
And finally…
I did the one thing I swore I wasn’t going to do.
I started an Excel workbook to track planting and care information for vegetables I haven’t even decided if I’m going to grow yet.
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 have a tendency to overcomplicate things. At least, that is probably how it appears from the outside. But for me, I usually have to do things the “hard way” if I want them to work at all.
For example, I grouped my garden into separate beds based on companion planting, water needs, shade requirements, and a variety of other factors. That left a lot of space in between them that still isn’t completely weeded and is taking a massive amount of time.
But all of that was necessary if I wanted to see what works and what doesn’t. I already know that I can’t plant anything close to the quince-from-hell, and that apparently I can kill peppermint where I intentionally planted it, but not the peppermint that insists on growing literally everywhere else in the garden.
I have notebooks for language learning. I keep lists of cocktail ideas. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time designing printables. I make tables, draw diagrams, and write down things that many people would simply trust themselves to remember.
I don’t think the complexity is the problem. I think it is how I learn.
I need to do things in a way that helps me not only learn, but remember what I learned and how I learned it.
Paying attention applies to just about everything I do instead of blindly hoping for success.
I have always felt the need to break things down and figure out how they work. I have never been able to simply memorize phrases and words in other languages because I need to know why something is spelled one way with one pronoun and differently when the pronoun changes.
I enjoy creating systems. I love finding patterns. That might mean I have more notebooks than most people find necessary.
Some days I will spend hours writing down Norwegian grammar rules and lists of reflexive verbs. Other days I will spend hours drawing diagrams of different baseball pitches.
What looks complicated to others simply feels interesting to me.
The goal was never perfection.
It was understanding.
And if understanding occasionally requires a little overcomplication, I think that’s a trade-off worth making.
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.
Every time I take a vacation (which is rare the past few years), I always end up being overly ambitious about how many books I will get through. Even though I always have my Kindle, I still think I should pack 3 or 4 physical books too.
I considered taking two physical books and one commonplace book for this trip and studying a bit. Then I remembered that ships sway. Like…a lot. I try very hard to keep my handwriting neat and readable, so I don’t believe a swaying ship will be conducive in this particular endeavor.
Thus, I will only take my Kindle. I have the Scribe, which comes with a stylus, so I can either take notes in the book itself, or highlight things I might want to transfer into a commonplace book after I get home.
I am also one of those people who packs a ton of stuff “just in case” I want to use it. For example, when I go to work, my bag contains my Kindle; a pen case with a variety of Zebra Mildliners, some washi tape, correction tape, a straightedge, two mechanical pencils, lead refills, and an eraser; at least two of my commonplace books; my planner (which is in its own purse); and if there is a morning/early afternoon baseball game, my tablet. Yesterday, I was excited to read during lunch, so guess what I forgot to pack? See? If I don’t have it, that’s the only thing I want.
So…I have to be firm while packing. Kindle, planner, maybe one commonplace book. Oh, and I suppose I should pack clothes.
Cèilidh Nam Freumhan 