The Para Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information

This post is 6 years old (on this day), so why do I read about this now?

What makes sense to me is

1) the connection between actionable/non-actionable and motivation. For example, I’m struggling to see the progress in my career. Now looking back at a few occasions it’s when I acted that things were changing (update resumé, apply for a job).

2) how information flows between “projects” - “areas” - “resources” - “archives”. I have always been struggling to organize my notes. I find “bullet journal” too strict and time-consuming. Tiago invites me to spend less time, opportunistically, organizing notes.

3) that the P.A.R.A system is intrinsically dynamic and follows a logic how knowledge is generated. But at the same time acknowledging that your goals change over time.

I've been trying out this organizational method for about 2 months now. tl;dr - everything falls into a Project.Area.Resource.Archive (sub)folder and the ideal is to rotate things through as soon as they're finished to Archives where you can ~forget about them. What I appreciate about it is how its recursive, so you can organize individual projects according to the PARA rules.

I agree with the author that its difficult to decide between Areas and Projects and appreciate his take that all Projects belong to an Area - insightful. One of the changes I've made to the system is to refer to Resources instead as Records. I like to take daily notes and keep to-do lists, summarize/link articles etc which usually have some type of temporal resolution and may not always fit in a specific project/area. So far I like it better than my old method of categorizing things by date and type and it meshes well with my fairly simple Obsidian environment.