One input for everything
The input bar sits at the bottom of every screen in the app. It takes typed text, voice, photos, screenshots, files, PDFs and links. There is no category picker, and you never say whether something is a note, a task, an expense or an event.
The same bar is used for three things, and you don’t have to say which. You can dump information in (“spent $18 on lunch today”). You can tell it to do something (“make me a reading list”, “organize my day”). And you can ask it a question (“what did I spend on food this month?”). It works out which one you meant.
What you send is kept exactly as you sent it
Anything you send is stored as you sent it, and it is never rewritten. Everything Commonplace builds is derived from those original messages, so any page can be traced back to the message that made it.
Right after you send something, Home shows a short checklist of everything it created or updated. You can open any line and see the actual page. If it read something wrong, you see that immediately and can correct it.
It decides what shape the information should take
Most apps that promise automatic organization tag your notes and make them searchable. Commonplace decides what each thing should become. It picks one of four shapes, rather than making all of them every time.
Small facts it just remembers
“Ephemeral is a nice word.” “Sam doesn’t drink coffee.” These don’t get a page. They sit in the background and come back when they’re relevant, or when you ask. If a fact later changes, the old version is kept, so there is a history.
Pages
A recipe, a person, a trip, an apartment search, a class schedule, an idea. Pages are the wiki of your life, and you browse them in the Library. They grow: mention three more things about the trip next week and the trip page updates.
Trackers
When something repeats and can be counted, like expenses, runs, gym sessions or supplements, Commonplace makes a proper tracker with real columns, real numbers, stats and charts, instead of a list of notes. You can ask for one, or it will notice you logging the same kind of thing over and over and offer to make one.
Things that need to reach you at a time
Reminders, appointments, birthdays, deadlines, recurring classes and meetings. These become notifications and cards on your home screen at the time they matter.
Pages nest. Lists hold pages. A person’s page lives inside People. Whatever belongs together ends up together, without you filing it.
New information updates what already exists
When new information changes something that already exists, Commonplace updates that page or tracker instead of creating another disconnected note. If your lab moves to a different day, the existing semester schedule changes. If you took creatine today but forgot yesterday, the tracker logs both. If you mention a person you already have a page for, that page gets the new details.
This is the part a list of tagged notes can’t do. Ten messages about the same trip become one trip page, and ten messages that say “$18 on lunch” become a monthly total.
The Library, and spaces
The Library is where everything about your life is organized, all the time. You browse it like a wiki. It is split into spaces, which are the rooms you divide your life into: personal and work, a business, one per kid. You choose how fine that split is.
Home
Home is a short guide to today, not a dashboard. It shows what is relevant right now: your day, what is due, what you are late on, birthdays, and anything the app wants to ask you. Things appear only when they matter. A birthday shows up the day before, not two weeks out. Your movie ticket shows up on the evening of the movie.
What it does without being asked
- Reminds you about things at the time they matter, with the relevant page or file attached.
- Asks follow-up questions. If you said you had a meeting, it might ask afterwards how it went, and your answer gets filed on its own.
- Offers help with things coming up. “School reopens next week, want to plan it?” These are quiet, they expire on their own, and they are cancelled if you have clearly already handled it.
- Asks permission before doing anything big you didn’t ask for.
- Keeps a running picture of who you are and what is central in your life right now. You can read it in settings.
Asking it things
Separately from dumping, you can have a normal conversation with it. In that mode it can read everything you have given it and answer, but it doesn’t write anything. Whatever you had open on screen is used as context, so “add this to it” works.
Things you might send it, and what happens
Each of these is written the way you would actually type it. Under each one is the checklist Commonplace shows for what it did.
A few things worth knowing
- Commonplace is a mobile app for iOS and Android. It is in private beta, and access is opening gradually.
- It is built for one person’s life. It isn’t a team workspace or a shared document tool.
- You don’t choose categories, templates or folders. If you would rather design your own structure, a tool like Notion is a better fit. Here is how the two compare.
- Asking never writes. Dumping does, and it shows you exactly what it wrote.
- The effort to keep all of this going is the same as texting yourself. That is the whole point.