Formidable Function
Lockebook cover: dark green with brass lettering, the title Lockebook and the line Write anywhere. Find anything.

Notebook

Lockebook

A commonplace notebook indexed by John Locke’s method. Write anywhere. Find anything.

Most notebooks make you choose sections up front, then run out of room in the wrong ones. The Lockebook uses the method Locke published for keeping a commonplace book: file each topic by two letters, its first letter and the vowel that follows, and keep the whole index on a few pages. Leadership goes under Le. Logistics goes under Lo.

View on AmazonHow the index works

Available now on Amazon in paperback. See Amazon for the current price.

What’s inside

  • 186 pre-numbered note pages, each with a topic line, index code, date and a See-also field to link related pages
  • A 6-page letter-and-vowel index, with extra room for common letters like S, C and P
  • The story of Locke’s method, with sources from the 1706 English edition
  • A clear how-to and a filled-in example index and note page
  • Gray lines that stay out of the way

Details

FormatPaperback, 6 x 9 in (15.2 x 22.9 cm)
Pages200 (186 numbered note pages)
PaperWhite paper, black ink interior, matte cover
AvailabilityAmazon (paperback)

Independent publication. Price and delivery are shown on Amazon.

A look inside

The pages you’ll use

Lockebook how-to page: name the topic, find its two-letter code, look it up in the index.
The how-to page: three steps.
Lockebook example index page with sample entries Art of war, Budget, Leadership and Logistics filed by two-letter codes.
The index, with sample entries.
Lockebook example note page titled Leadership, with a topic line, index code Le, date, page number and See-also page links.
A note page, filled in as an example.

Who it’s for

Leaders, students, readers, and anyone whose best ideas get lost in old notebooks. If you take notes by hand and want to find them again in ten seconds, this is for you.

Questions

Is it a blank notebook or a guided one?

It’s a blank-page notebook with structure: numbered pages, a topic line on each page and an index at the front. What you write is up to you.

Do I need to learn a complicated system?

No. The rule is one sentence: take the first letter of your topic word and the first vowel after it. The explainer takes about two minutes.

Was Locke’s method really published?

Yes. It first appeared in French in 1686, and the English translation, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, was published in London in 1706.

Is this the same as the earlier Lockebook edition?

This is a new edition of the Lockebook, with a refreshed design and a new Amazon listing once it is released.

View on AmazonAlso see Taps & Reveille