A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

“We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one. Not only did all these famous and great individuals do it. But so have common people throughout history. Our true understanding of the Civil War, for example, is a result of the spread of cheap diaries and notebooks that soldiers could record their thoughts in.

But I am very encouraged to see that other people have their own unique way of recording the wisdom they come across in their own lives, in their own reading and during the course of the work. It was also exciting to hear how useful a commonplace book could be for as diverse of occupations as soldier to cook to artist. Whether you use notebooks or notecards or Evernote, a commonplace book is a fantastic idea that I promise will improve your life.

In this book we use workflows as a lens to examine the often omitted tools, material conditions, and activities of writing. Although the field of Writing Studies has numerous theoretical methods and lenses for considering the mediated and socially situated work of writing, we have few descriptions how specific pieces of software and hardware mediate writing in practice. A focus on workflows highlights the importance of writing tools and allows us to consider how tools shape activity and, in turn, how activity shapes tools.

We offer the concept of workflow as a way to move personal and local computing practices into a form of disciplinary knowledge.

As researchers, we argue that workflows can further our understanding of and approaches to writing processes, and we develop that argument through what we call workflow thinking, or the act of reading knowledge work as modular and intertwined with technologies, and workflow mapping, or the personal examination of how writing preferences accrete over time.

In these contexts, “workflow” functions as a personal process, rubric, and metacognitive lens. A workflow, for these writers, is a means of evaluating the components, processes, procedures, and technologies of their work. It is a lens through which they can look at their broader writing process and begin to analyze the connections, intersections, and fissures within the component parts of their work. And it is a lens that is fully intertwined in writing technologies.

From our participants’ practices we draw the concept of workflow thinking—the act of reading knowledge work as modular and intertwined with technologies. Workflow thinking allows our participants to break any given project into a series of shorter process steps—a perspective that is well in line with Writing Studies’ understanding of process and its typical pedagogical practices. Workflow thinking, however, foregrounds the mediated nature of that work. It looks at each task or component and asks a series of questions about the writing technologies and available affordances within that component: “Through which technologies will I accomplish this task? Why? What does a change in technologies offer here?” For our participants, a shift in these practices might afford them mobility, the removal of drudgery, new ways of seeing a problem, or new invention strategies. In each case, however, they can use this mediated and modular thinking to reevaluate when and how they approach knowledge work.

In this way, we want to emphasize that workflow thinking can be a personal reevaluation of the capital-minded, deskilling focus of workflows in industry or business contexts.

A lens of workflow thinking pushes against this, instead asking “What are the component pieces of this work?,” “How is this mediated?,” and “What might a shift in mediation or technology afford me in completing this?” In short, we see workflow thinking as a way to reclaim agency and push against institutionally purchased software defaults.

We also offer workflow mapping as a complement to workflow thinking. Where workflow thinking imagines new composing possibilities, workflow mapping instead looks backward, asking how practices and preferences accrete over time.

Workflows, however, aren’t about tools used in isolation or in perfect test conditions. Rather, a workflow is a habituated, mediated, and personal means of accomplishing something.

For participants in the workflow affinity space, searching for friction means identifying and eliminating moments when software gets in the way.

We believe that a workflow-focused approach to computing tools and environments offers a pathway to agency, creativity, and confidence with computing, which is the spirit that has driven work in computers and writing research since the late 1970s.

Workflows provide a similar opportunity: the chance to consider and think through one’s use of writing technologies and ask “What’s troublesome here?,” “What are new possibilities for this work?,” and “How might other mediated approaches allow me to see this work differently?” Through seeing knowledge work as modular, flexible, and adaptable, workflow thinking challenges the transparent technology model that dominates much of the contemporary computing market, and it encourages users to move beyond default solutions and configurations.

Although intensely personal and often idiosyncratic, workflows are also replicable and shareable things.

Instead, we want to step back and recommend a broader practice of meta-awareness, encouraging writers to consider why they have chosen particular writing technologies or practices, how those technologies and practices shape their process, and what a change to those practices might offer.