A Common Place for Remembering, Organizing and Using Everything You Read

A digital commonplace book in Obsidian is being built to capture “analytical reading” artifacts—bibliographic details, re-outlined arguments in the reader’s own words, future rabbit holes, and selected quotes—so knowledge can be found and reused later without forcing every note into a rigid writing workflow. The core idea is simple but consequential: full ownership of a book comes from making it part of one’s thinking, and the most reliable way to do that is to write—first while marking and digesting the text, then again by re-outlineing it after a short pause.

The system is grounded in Mortimer Adler’s advice from *How to Read a Book*, paired with a reading framework from Adler’s “pyramid of books.” Most reading falls into low-effort categories (glancing or inspectional reading), but only a small top slice merits the kind of deep, repeatable engagement the method targets. The commonplace book is reserved for those higher-value works—roughly the “top 10%” that justify an analytical read one pass or more—so the notes don’t become an unmanageable dump of everything consumed.

In Obsidian, the structure starts with a theme (“Typewriter” in light mode) and a root folder organized primarily by genre. Each genre folder contains a “folder note” index, implemented via the community plugin “folder note,” which turns a folder into a navigable note while preserving backlinks and a clean hierarchy. Tags add another layer of filtering; the notes use a “genre” tag so graph views can visually separate categories.

Inside each book’s note, the workflow is designed to preserve three kinds of outcomes. First is knowledge acquired: an analytical outline created after reading and re-reading. The process includes marking the book during the first pass, letting it sit for about a week or two, then extracting notes and reorganizing them into a re-outline that follows the book’s argument sequence—an approach meant to mirror the reader’s “intellectual ownership.” Second is future reading: a place to record follow-on books or papers sparked by the original text, including “desired difficulties” as a recurring interest. Third is quotable material: pithy lines captured with a “greater than” marker and, when possible, page numbers for retrieval.

A key design choice is how the notes are browsed. The system uses embedded “card-like” previews (via Obsidian’s embedded note syntax with an exclamation mark) so the reader can flip through notes as if laying index cards on a table. At the same time, the folder-based view supports quick scanning of all notes tied to a concept. The author also highlights a limitation: the embedded cards can’t easily be reorganized or sorted, though a future workspace could enable temporary rearrangement.

Over time, the payoff is expected to come from linking ideas across books. Instead of building elaborate external knowledge structures, the notes are meant to connect concepts by their shared themes—such as “learning environments” and “range”—when multiple books discuss overlapping practices. The result is a visual, searchable archive that supports writing by “pillage” of prior learning artifacts, while reducing the friction of deciding where every note must go next.