Meet the Founder

Pictured: Jess Waldschmidt, Founder of The Commonplace Company

I’m Jess, and The Commonplace Company is my way of tending to the quiet, unseen work that holds a life together.

I grew up in Iowa, the kind of kid who always had a notebook nearby—and, famously in our house, the kid who made forms for my mom to fill out. I’d design little checklists and questionnaires to keep track of family plans, preferences, and projects, long before I knew “systems” and “strategy” were real words for what I was doing. That instinct carried me through a degree in graphic communications, a career in higher‑ed market research and strategy, and years of moving between Iowa and Oregon, building new rhythms from scratch each time.

Over time, I learned that the planning that matters most isn’t the glossy, color‑coded kind. It’s the quiet decisions about how you’ll spend a Tuesday, what you’ll keep, what you’ll let go of, and how you’ll care for your people in the seasons you can see coming, and the ones you can’t. That’s the kind of planning I care about: grounded, humane, rooted in ordered love rather than endless optimization.

The Commonplace Company is where I gather what I’ve learned: about attention, about seasonality, about building gentle systems that actually fit a real life, and offer it back in the form of planning practices, templates, and (soon) self‑paced courses. You can think of it as a kind of modern commonplace book for your life and household: a place to collect what matters, organize it with care, and return to it over time. Nothing here is about becoming a new person overnight. It’s about noticing what already matters to you, and then making space for it on purpose.

By day, I work remotely in strategy and research for Oregon State University; by night and weekends, I bring that same listening, pattern‑spotting, and “let’s make this clearer” energy into this company. Everything I create our curate starts as something I needed in my own life, gets refined through real‑world use, and is shaped with the assumption that you are tired, thoughtful, and already doing your best.