The Commonplace Philosophy

Everything you do every day depends on information in some way. The people we work with, the money we spend, the things we’re learning, the commitments we make, the ideas we want to pursue, etc. But keeping that information useful requires constant work. It’s distributed across applications, with structures built for and around each different type, and there’s a constant need for maintenance and keeping track of where it is, and on top of all that, most of the information we hold in our head doesn’t properly fit anywhere. It has no place for it.

We’ve become remarkably accustomed to this. We accept that having an organized life requires the discipline to maintain an organization system. And when the system falls apart, we blame our habits.

I think we should expect more from the system. Especially with what we have at our disposal now.

I want to reference the greatest product launch of all time: the 2007 Macworld Keynote where the first iPhone was introduced. One thing was very clear: what we had up until that point (i.e., the BlackBerry) wasn’t bad, it was “good enough”. Not many questioned it because they were fine with it, even with all of its limitations. It is true that it was good enough, but we are not in the game for “good enough”, and if we had left it at that, we would’ve never gotten the iPhone. That launch was revolutionary, because it shattered the notion of what smartphones could be.

The organization systems we have now are the BlackBerry. They are great, as long as you look at them and only them. But calling them information management systems is the same as calling the BlackBerry a smartphone. So we don’t take a look at what they don’t do, we take a look at what Commonplace does.

Commonplace is a general information system, where information flows freely, both across the system, and between the system and you, the user. Right now we have drawn lines separating information based on modality, length, form, type, etc., but everything boils down to information. So, we took that as the foundation of Commonplace: simply information. Now Commonplace has something raw to work with, and then comes the second half, which is re-representation. AI now lets us understand information in any form, and represent it in any form, that is to say, the most useful form. Your day’s agenda with all the reminders and events is information in the same way a recipe card, or an expense database, or your medical history are information. The difference is in how they are represented, not their nature, because their nature is always simply information.

This allows one more very important thing that no organization system does right: proactivity. The nature and architecture of Commonplace makes it implicitly proactive. Proactiveness is baked into the second half: the representation of information. A suggestion based on your context is simply information that comes to you, placed somewhere for you, maybe with a notification. And just like everything else, it’s based on all the information in the first half.

And the cherry on top with all of this is that the effort required to maintain your Commonplace is simply raw, messy, information dumping.

Information must move freely within a system, and must be representable in any form. That requires intelligence, and a very powerful organization system. That’s Commonplace.

Don’t fix the habit. Fix the system.