Chromatics

Your shelf · In your own workspace

How I keep a commonplace book in Notion

Readers have kept commonplace books for centuries — Locke published an indexing method for his in 1706; E. M. Forster kept his for forty-five years and it was published as a book of its own. Mine lives in Notion, next to everything else I think in. Call it a second brain if you like; Locke just called it an index. The part I never do by hand anymore is the copying: I read on my phone, I keep a line, and it’s a database row before I’ve turned the page.

11:40 p.m. · In the book

Keep the line where you found it

In Chromatics every voice holds one color for the whole novel, so when a line stops me — Catherine insisting, Tom Buchanan condescending — I select it and tap Keep. It lands in the app’s commonplace book in its speaker’s color, with the scene and the date riding along. That’s the whole gesture. No screenshots, no typing quotes into my phone at midnight.

The commonplace book in the app — grouped by book, each spine in the book’s most-kept voice.

7 a.m. · In Notion

Find it in the database in the morning

Connect a workspace once (Send to Notion, approve, pick a page) and Chromatics builds the database itself: quote, speaker, book, scene, when you kept it, your note — each a real column. The rows below aren’t a mockup composed for this page; they’re lines kept in the app and synced to a connected workspace, colors and all — Catherine still red, Tom still talking down to everyone in orange.

Real rows from a connected workspace. The quote text carries the voice’s color into Notion; Speaker and Book arrive as select properties, so every view you can build on a select, you can build on your reading.

In Notion · What I actually do with it

Views I’d rebuild in a heartbeat

One voice. Speaker is a select property, so filter: Speaker is Tom gives you every line Tom Buchanan ever said that stopped you — which turns out to be a character study you wrote without noticing. Do it for Elizabeth Bennet. Do it for the Creature. It’s the cheapest close-reading tool I know.

By book. Group the table by Book (or make a board — every column a novel, every card a line). Six months of reading becomes a wall of spines you can walk past.

A line each morning. Add a linked view of the database to your dashboard or daily-note template, sort by Kept, limit to one, and you’ve built a quiet quote-of-the-day widget out of your own reading. If you keep a daily page, /linked view of database drops your commonplace book into it wherever you write.

Your margins. The Note column is yours — and every row is a full Notion page underneath, so a kept line can grow backlinks, tags, connections to the book’s page in your library database, whatever your system wants. Locke’s index, with relations.

In Notion · The rules

Append and preserve

The sync has one discipline and we hold to it: we only ever add rows (and quietly keep the Note column current when you edit a note in the app). Retitle the database, tag rows by theme, build every view above — none of it will be touched. We never reorder, never delete. Disconnect and the database simply stays where it is. It was always yours.

And if Notion isn’t where your reading lives: the same keeps flow to Readwise the moment you keep them, Obsidian takes clean Markdown, and there’s always the plain file — Markdown or CSV — because a commonplace book you can’t take with you is somebody else’s book.

Keep the line in the book. Find it in your workspace.

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