Today's word is..."Tsundoku"

I found out one of my wife's secrets the other day.  You see, I have a really bad habit of printing out articles or papers on various topics and stacking them in various corners of our house.  I will even occasionally read the articles, but most of them I don't.  I tell myself (and my wife), "Some day, I will need this article!"  I used to have a large filing cabinet at work with a filing system for most of my journal articles that  I claim to need for reference some day, but when I moved my office a few years ago, I threw most of these out ("purge day") and got rid of the filing cabinet.  Now my articles collect on my desk at work or my desk at home.  Unfortunately, my filing system was far from perfect - I usually only filed away the articles that I had read.  Hence, again, several articles would get stacked in various corners around the house.  The really important ones would go in my bag and travel back and forth between work and home.

As it turns out, my wife had a system too.  She would monitor my stacks of papers closely.  If I had not touched a stack in say, six months or so, she would carefully move the stack to a new location.  She would wait another six months or so, and if the stack was still there (and if the stack had collected enough dust to provide evidence that I still had not touched it), she would move it again one more time, this time under our bed.  Now if I hadn't touched or asked for the stack under our bed in another six months or so, she would throw them out (of course, she dumped them in the recycle bin).  Our kids thought this was pretty funny.

I have a sickness - obviously.  In all truth, I suspect that if you looked through one of my stacks, you would likely find multiple copies of the same article.  Rather than look through the stacks, I probably just look for the article online and print it again.  I will collect small scraps of paper or tear out news articles that have quotes or interesting points to make, all with the thought that I will "need the information for reference some day."  It gets worse - I also like to read books (just like I haven't really made the transition from paper articles to PDF's, I would much rather read books the old-fashioned way than reading from an e-book device).  I have stacks and stacks of books, many of which that I have read, some of which I have not.  I really enjoy reading, on a number of different topics.  And I seem to go in phases, where I will read books and articles on a specific topic before getting tired of it and moving on to something else.

Imagine my surprise, when I found out there is a word that describes my habit.  The Japanese phrase, "tsundoku" is a phrase used to describe the habit of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.  According to Wikipedia, the word originated in the Meiji era (1868-1912) from the Japanese words for "piling things up" ("tsunde-oku") and "reading books" ("dokusho").  I literally just learned this phrase last week - my wife thought the word described me perfectly! 

As it turns out, I learned another new word recently.  Apparently, people like me, who like to keep quotes, phrases, or various tidbits of information handy keep something called a "commonplace book".  The author, Ryan Holiday, posted an article describing his method of keeping a commonplace book which is really helpful.  A commonplace book is like a journal, but rather than collecting only your personal reflections, you use the commonplace book to jot down an interesting fact, quote, or just about anything else to keep for handy reference.  A number of famous individuals over the course of history have kept commonplace books, some of which have been published over the years (just search for "commonplace book" on Amazon.com if you want to see a few examples). 

There are a number of ways to keep a commonplace book.  The purists would say that a commonplace book should be handwritten or typed (i.e. you don't "copy and paste" electronically something you find interesting into an electronic version of your commonplace book).  After looking at a number of blog sites where individuals talk about how they keep their personal commonplace book, I decided to start one - in my case, I am using an app that is perfect for use as a commonplace book.  I can keep pictures, diagrams, cartoons, quotes, poems, or anything I find interesting.  And, because my commonplace book is electronic, I can file things under various subheadings to be easily searched at a later date (that, I think, is one major advantage over a handwritten journal).  It works for me, and my stacks of papers are slowly but surely withering away.

So there you have it - a word to describe my "problem" ("tsundoku") as well as a word to help me with it ("commonplace book").