I am trying to get into a better habit of curating. I have amassed a collection of quotations, ideas for books and a huge assortment of links to crafts and homeschool materials, but they are all on various devices and in the deep recesses of my head ;) I am now slowly sieving through this stockpile and attempting to transcribe them into my commonplace book.

You might wonder why I should bother when I can just digitise everything. The fact is, it doesn’t really work for me. I have used Pinterest, saved links into bookmarks and even considered using apps like Evernote. All of this should have made me more organized, but I got nowhere to actually synthesizing the information and translating it into actual beneficial knowledge. Cutting and pasting is very quick… for me, though, the pen is mightier than the keyboard. I need more than a cursory glance and prefer a physical repository of ideas.

These are the things I am keeping in my commonplace book:

• poetry
• passages from books that I especially like
• recipes
• supplications from the Quran and Sunnah
• quotable quotes
• speeches
• articles

Do you keep a commonplace book? What do you journal about?