Journaling

In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary.

I know of executives and investors who keep a “decision journal” in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.

Journal writing is like singing in the shower—I can let ’er rip without fear of judgment.

The practice of writing down one’s thoughts and notes to help make sense of the world has a long legacy. For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”