making your own personal compendium in a paper notebook is one of the best methods for learning new topics and mastering your favorite subjects hey welcome to ParkNotes i'm Parker i'm a philosopher and theologian and this is a channel where I help you study think and read more deeply this video is all about compendiums or if we're being accurate to the Latin compendia but I'm probably going to say compendiums because I'm an American swine but it's all about this one style of keeping a notebook to help yourself learn new topics and master your favorite subjects so in this video I'll describe the four different kinds of compendiums that you could keep i'll show you three ways to find information for your compendiums and then I'll explain how to actually use your compendium to learn and master the information that you collect for it now I recently wrote up the information from this video in a blog post so if you want to read along you can find that linked in the description it is a paid post over there partially because it's a part of the research and writing I'm doing for my forthcoming book journal like a philosopher so consider supporting me over there if you want to read the full thing otherwise keep watching this video to get the gist of all the info so first things first what is a compendium a compendium is a collection of information and analysis about a body of knowledge the information is usually meant to be comprehensive in its scope and systematically presented these are related to encyclopedias in that an encyclopedia is meant to be a compendium of all human knowledge and these are usually organized alphabetically so all encyclopedias are compendiums but not all compendiums are encyclopedias so a good example of a compendium is this Peterson's field guide to reptiles and amphibians it's a concise field guide to nearly 200 reptiles and amphibians of North America when you open up this book you find concise information on each animal on the left side of the page and then on the right side you find beautiful naturalistic art of the animal in view and you'll see this is just a collection of information this is not a commonplace book a commonplace book is a collection of quotations usually organized according to a particular scope and for a particular purpose often according to common places or common headings or tags now if you know me at all you know that I am obsessed with commonplace books i love them if you want to learn more about those you can find an entire playlist right here in the description but let's get back to compendiums in a compendium you're not going to find quotations you're just going to find the pertinent information another good example of a compendium would be the bullet journal compendium that comes with the official loyster 1917 bullet journal this is a collection of information about how to go about keeping your bullet journal it's just the information you need to get started and keep going with the system so it's comprehensive in its scope it's everything you need to know about bullet journals and it's systematically presented so it's easy to reference again it's not a commonplace book it doesn't care about quotations you're not going to find Ryder Carol's quotations in here it's just about the information needed to keep your own bullet journal so what I'm suggesting is that you start creating your own compendiums kind of like these examples that I've given in order to organize and collect information on topics you want to learn and master okay so a question that you may be asking right now is if someone else has already made a compendium about the topics that I want to research and study and master then why should I go about all the trouble of finding a notebook and creating my own compendiums well the process of actually researching the information for your compendium and putting it in your own words instead of just quoting it verbatim will help you encode that information better and recall it better later on as well writing longhand notes in your own words helps you metabolize that information as you go it helps you make the information your own there's at least one psychological study that I found which backs this up it's called the pen is mightier than the keyboard advantages of longhand over laptop note-taking the study has to do with taking lecture notes and it suggests that the students who took their notes by hand were actually forced to take more active notes since they couldn't write fast enough to copy the professor's words verbatim this actually ended up helping them recall the information later on so in your own compendiums don't just copy over quotations from books that you read or journal articles but instead try to analyze that information and put it in your own words while being as accurate as possible the act of putting the information in your own words will help acquaint you with this information and will help you store it and make it easier to retrieve later on which can eventually help you master it now a second question you may be asking yourself is why do I need a paper notebook well there's another study which suggests that people who write down information in paper notebooks experienced better information acquisition deeper encoding of information and better retrieval of that information than those who used a tablet or a smartphone all this suggests that the use of a paper notebook for information collection affects higher order brain functions and may have something to do with the spatial dimensions of a notebook and the tactile nature of it so I linked both of those studies below so you guys can check those out for yourselves now I'm a philosopher i am an armchair philosopher so I don't want to lean on those studies too heavily i'm not a research psychologist but I will say that the results of those two studies do cohhere with my own experience as a grad student for 11 semesters i have a very hard time remembering information from courses where I took down lecture notes verbatim and on my laptop and I have a much easier time remembering information from courses where I took notes with pen and paper i have a hard time remembering information from books I read on Kindle even on my Kindle Paperwhite which does allow me to annotate and I have a much easier time remembering information from physical books and papers I printed out and annotated there seems to be something about the spatial dimensions of physical books and notebooks that help you encode information better and retrieve it more easily and this fact bears out in my own experience likewise there's something about struggling to put information in your own words that helps you store it better and recall it faster and more easily so all that to say I think you should start your compendium in a paper notebook and if you hate it at least you have some kind of evidence that it doesn't work for you and when a paper pusher like me comes along you can say "Look I already tried that i like digital better." So at least give paper notebooks a shot now how do you actually go about starting your own compendium well first get yourself a notebook i like lost term 1917 A5s but maybe those are too big for your first compendium you may like a B6 plus or one of the Fieldnotes 64page notebooks instead it doesn't really matter all that much just get yourself a notebook next determine the topic of your compendium what do you want to study what do you need to learn just ask yourself two questions is my compendium meant to be general or topic specific if it's general then maybe we'll call this an encyclopedia and if it's topic specific we'll call it a topic specific compendium next we'll determine the intended use of your compendium is your compendium a collection of information for personal use like using for writing papers or for studying for tests or for writing your blogs or book reviews or for referencing on your YouTube videos or is your compendium a collection of information that you intend to pass along to others maybe your child or your friend or your subscribers are you going to publish your compendium online somewhere or have it printed up for mass production how you answer those two questions will determine which of the four kinds of compendiums you want to keep so what's the topic is it meant to be general if it's general maybe we'll call that an encyclopedia because encyclopedias are compendiums of all human knowledge and your personal encyclopedia which is just general information is like a collection of all your personal knowledge if it's meant to be topic specific if it's just about one particular topic then we'll call that a topic specific compendium and then what is the intended use of your compendium is it just for you to study and master topics that you want to learn about or do you intend to share it with someone else like your daughter or like your subscribers if it's just for you then we'll call them personal compendiums or encyclopedias and if it's intended to share information with others we'll call it public or communal compendiums or encyclopedias man that is a mouthful i'm getting sick of saying compendium but we're almost done so now we have the four kinds of compendiums that you could keep a personal encyclopedia this is a collection of information on all sorts of topics that you find interesting or want to remember but which is just meant for your own personal use we have a public encyclopedia this is a collection of information on all sorts of topics that you find interesting or want to remember which you publish for others to use or which you pass on to your own kids or someone else then we have a personal topic specific compendium this is a collection of information on one particular topic to help you personally learn remember and master the topic and finally we have a public or communal topic specific compendium which is a collection of information on one particular topic to help others learn remember and master the topic as you've learned it now I think that the personal topic specific compendium is the very best tool that you can use to learn a new topic and to master that topic but I do kind of keep some of these other styles of compendiums as well i have a kind of personal encyclopedia which I've called my contemplatio this is just a collection of a bunch of information that I want to master and remember but there's no specific theme to it it's just a bunch of information I want to personally remember things like the difference between Cartisian minds and Kant's transcendental ego or Luciano Fluid's life cycle of information or a quick look at the history of artificial intelligence i also keep something like a public encyclopedia this is my good idea holocron it's a collection of all the good ideas that I write down in my pocket notebooks i abstract them out when I'm done and I put them in here to be worked on and published on my blog or make it into a video on one of my various YouTube channels i don't really keep a public topic specific compendium but you can look at something like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for something like that yes it's called an encyclopedia but it kind of is a topic specific compendium because it's about philosophy now philosophy is such a broad and huge topic that I guess it does make sense to call it the encyclopedia of philosophy because philosophy touches on so many different things there's so many different subfields but I guess we don't really need to split hairs this much that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of as a public topic specific compendium and I don't really keep one of these but I have been starting to keep a lot of personal topic specific compendiums things like my philosophy of time compendium my own personal philosophy compendium which is a collection of information that I often forget but don't want to forget anymore my philosophy of mind compendium my personal handbook which is a compendium of my goals and my resolutions which is meant for reflection and habituation this helps me know myself and rule myself and then I've started some others but you don't care about all of my compendiums let's talk about how to find the entries for your compendium so first off the scope will determine what entries go in your compendium what's the theme or topic of your compendium okay now go out and find that kind of information go read books and blogs and listen to podcasts and email professors and take courses online or in person on those topics you want to learn and on those subjects you want to master now I've come up with three ways that you can go about collecting the information for your entries in your compendium the first way I'm just calling ad hoc entries these are entries as you go so as you find interesting or important information you add the information into the proper compendium maybe you find an article on the philosophy of time add that information to your philosophy of time compendium this is an ad hoc process you're adding as you go and as you find the information but you don't have particular entries in mind beforehand next up is post hawk entries these are entries after the fact so you keep a personal encyclopedia of all the information you want to remember or master you create headings for each entry so you can come back and find the information you want to study at a later time you go through your personal encyclopedia and create new entries based on the information you've already collected now you may find a pattern in the kinds of information that you're drawn to maybe like a third of the information is on distinctions between a republic and a democracy if that's the case and it's taking up so much of your general encyclopedia then it looks like you have the topic for a new topic specific compendium and you can just roll that off and create a new one and then finally we have ant hawk entries entries beforehand in this mode of creating entries for your compendium you'll come up with the kinds of entries you want beforehand and then you go out and you find the information needed to complete them so how do you do this well you come up with a list and create an index for yourself in the back of your notebook i've come to love the upside down and backwards method of creating an index you just flip the notebook upside down and then you turn it backwards and you start the index upside down and backwards and you're going this way while the information in your compendium is going that way so eventually the two will meet up but you have as much space as you need for your index you can keep going the whole thing could be an index if you want it's not going to be because the content will take up more space than the actual index itself but this way you can have the two meet in the middle and you don't run out of space one of the really hard things about coming up with categories and entries beforehand is you don't really know the topic all that well you're using your compendium to learn the topic and to master it so you do a little bit of preliminary research and you come up with some things you want to research but as you study and learn you're going to realize there's a whole lot of other categories and topics that you want to study so just flip your notebook upside down and backwards and add in those new topics you want to go out and study so that's how we can make our compendiums but how do we actually use them for studying well first up you flip through it often the act of making your compendium notebook will already help you encode and recall the information you collect but bringing it with you to a coffee shop or on your commute and reading back through it will also help you remember the information as well also you can put it on your nightstand and flip through it before bed in order to get that information deep into your mind for encoding as you sleep the second way is to use it for active recall so read through an entry from your compendium close the notebook then try to reproduce that information from memory on a scratch piece of paper if it's super easy to do then it looks like you have that information in your head if not then you need to do some more work with that entry open up to that entry and reread it and try again you can also try active recall by speaking it out loud by yourself so you open up to an entry you read it over you close the notebook and then you try to actively recall that information by speaking it out and trying to reproduce that entry out loud by yourself this is a way to activate different parts of your brain different parts of your cognitive system and your senses and then another way to use active recall is trying to explain the information from your entries to someone else teaching someone else will help you process and store the information better now a really important thing to remember is this is like a first draft this is not a final product you don't have to turn this in this is not going to be mass- prodduced this is your first draft compendium you're using it as a tool to help you learn so if you have to scribble things out or maybe tear out an entire entry or scribble out the whole thing that's okay this is a first draft maybe you have to make two or three in order to get the final one but you're probably not going to ever have a final compendium unless you are under contract and publishing it if it's a personal use at all then it's for your personal use it's a tool don't get all stressed out about making it perfect and writing perfect and getting all the information exactly perfectly right every single time it's a work in progress and that's actually a good thing okay so that's that this video was kind of a compendium on compendiums and now I am done saying that word maybe forever i hope you guys found this video helpful if you did then leave me your thoughts in a comment and make sure you leave me a little thinking emoji make sure to like this video and share it with a friend and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any tips and tricks in the notebook space and a bunch of weird random philosophy stuff all right that's going to do it for now i'll catch you guys next time