This blogpost summarizes some of the main points from the book titled “The PARA Method”, by Tiago Forte.

Context

Stumbled on to this book by Tiago Forte a week ago. I have read this book after experimenting with Org-Roam and Zettlekasten.Found the concepts in the book pretty interesting and hence started working through them so that I can implement the method in my workflow. However I had to make some tweaks so that it is applicable to the way I organize content. In the recent few weeks, I have tried looking at Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking videos and realized that he has some very useful and relevant principles that can be incorporated in to one’s workflow. I must say that I went in to this rabbit hole of understanding the concepts and tooling around the following topics:

  • Zettlekasten : A smarter way to take notes
  • Obsidian tool and the way it can be used to link notes together. It can be a good tool for implementing Zettlekasten
  • Logseq is another tool that is in the same arena as Obsidian that is open sourced
  • Org-Roam is something that I have been using for at least a year but I was using a minimal functionality of Org-Roam. I did give a PKM a thought a few years ago but many other office projects did not allow me to take a mini excursion and learn about these things. In the past few weeks, I took a deliberate break and explored these things as I found my note-taking skills, my digital repositories pretty messy and I had hard time collecting, retrieving and analyzing the info. Thanks to this time spend, I am not a total org-roam convert
    • This immersion also lead me to vertico and marginalia and bunch of other emacs plugins that made me move away from helm. I am loving the transition to vertico
  • LYT is a channel run by Nick Milo on YouTube. A nice channel that can serve as food for thought. Watched a few videos and found some videos relating to obsidian interesting. One can go through the videos and implement the same in Org-Roam. The interesting mindset that Nick talks about is the tension between Knowledge and Action, Folders and Links. Never thought about it until I watched the video where Nick explains it clearly.
  • Idea Compass: An idea that every note should contain four tags
    • Up: Source note where this idea is mentioned
    • Down: Where does the note lead to ?
    • Left: A link to a note that mentions competing ideas
    • Right: A link to a note that has similar ideas
  • Maps of Content: Informally I was maintaining these files but never gave it a formalized folder structure.
  • Excalidraw: Another tool that can help you incorporate visual thinking in your notes. The guy running this YT channel has some amazing content on how one can think visually while reading or understanding something
  • Reader and Readwise : Had tried out Readwise in 2022 I guess but never paid attention to it now. Managed to experiment with Reader and Readwise. For all these years since I had been introduced to this tool, I hardly took notice of the tool. In the last few weeks I was so impressed by the tool that I signed up for a paid subscription

There is a whole universe of content waiting to be read, discovered and understood once I went in to the rabbit hole. I never knew that there are even conferences around PKM. One thing that has hit me after reading and spending time with the above principles is that - What the heck was I doing until now ? I had never spent time in thinking about organizing the content on my laptop or for that matter my cloud backups ? Most of the linking across ideas I was doing was via individual org files or blog posts or some means of artifacts that could summarize the linkages ? Was I ever mining this links to create new content ? Not necessarily ? May be because my job is not of a content creator. Even though I don’t make a living based on content creation, the principles mentioned in this book and related books are very useful. I did come across “Second Brain” as a concept many years ago but I never paid attention to it. I have this book lying on my book shelf for at least 2 years and I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I never found time to read, ingest and apply or try applying the principles.

Given that I have spent sometime in going through the above, the least I can do is to write a few reviews on how I feel about these tools, my experience with implementing some of the principles using Org-Roam. In this post though, I will try to give a brief summary of the book The PARA method

As I reflected, I realized that the process of writing this book review needs to change if I have to incorporate some of the principles mentioned in the above resources. If I need to incorporate literature notes and permanent notes in to book review workflow, I need to literature note and a permanent note. By creating a literature note, it forces me to understand the linkages and the potential linkages the book will have with my existing knowledge. Took some time out and experimented with the above concepts, folder structure and tools and churned out this book review. I felt much better as the content is far more structured and organized and easily retrievable

Overview

The book is about helping one organize one’s digital content in a way that is platform agnostic. However the organizational principles are action driven and folder centric. So, you don’t need any specific software to get this done. It is a way in which action oriented thinking is translated in to way we can organize content on our laptops, cloud storage devices and apps.

Key Idea

The key idea is stated in the title of the book itself, PARA, a method that can be used to organize files in any repository. The system is agnostic to the platform; you might have data or files on a cloud storage, you might be storing data on your local machine, you might have organized content in a specific app for a specific purpose. PARA in essence says that we must organize files for action and proposed four folders for this purpose

  • P is the Projects folder. This is the folder where all the current projects or activities that have an outcome and due date are in place. These are the active projects that you might be working on any time. They could range from anywhere between 5 to 12 projects that you could be simultaneously working or plan to work in the immediate future activities that are done periodically, that don’t have a due date
  • A is the Areas folder. This is the folder where all the data related to ongoing activities live. This folder can be the home to any number of activities that are done periodically. There are facets of your work and life that don’t have a clear end goal or deadline. We call them “areas of responsibility.”
  • R is the Resources folder. This is the folder where you keep all the documents and assets that one can call interests, curiosities and passions. They are not immediately useful but might be useful at a later point in time. These are not documents that are interesting. That will be too much as our world is filled with fascinating things. These documents are related to something that you might find it useful at a later point in time.
  • A is the Archives folder. One should not be carried away by the name. An archive folder is not some place where all the things go and we never get to revisit it. Contrast to that, the folder contains past projects done, any projects that that can shareable and that are not near term projects.

So, the key message is that you can reorganize based on PARA in less than a minute

  • Step 1: Archive existing files
  • Step 2: Create project folders
  • Step 3: Create additional folders as needed

Notable Quotes

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now.

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now.

Using PARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go. It is about organizing information in such a way that it supports and calls into being the future life you want to lead.

PARA isn’t a mechanical system like a car engine that needs very precise and regular maintenance. It’s more like an organic system such as a pond or a forest. The same way a pond will begin to stagnate and smell if the water isn’t flowing, your PARA system will soon go out of date

  • The only thing that will remain is the habits you adopt or change as a result of the advice I’ve given you.
  • HABIT #1:Organize According to Outcomes
    • This is exactly what PARA is designed for:Every decision is made through the lens of “What will help me move this forward?” All the up-front work of meticulous tagging and labeling and titling is eliminated.
  • HABIT #2:Organize Just in Time
    • There’s no maintenance required, except getting your projects done.The most actionable category of “Projects” is closely guarded against distractions from other kinds of information that seem interesting but aren’t useful.
  • Everything you want depends on how much power you have. All the goals you have for your career and your family, all the change you want to cause in your field or your community, all the relationships you want to form or improve, all the things you want to experience and possess ability to draw power from every source available to you and direct it toward the outcomes you want
  • Power comes from the force of your emotions. By surrounding yourself with information that provokes a feeling of fascination
  • Power comes from systems that don’t depend on your energy levels, attention span, or self-discipline. That’s why PARA asks you to make one decision for each piece of information, and one decision only: When will this be relevant next?
  • Finally, power comes from alignment. Don’t create a bunch of aspirational projects and goals that are merely wishful thinking. When you have the courage to tell the truth about what is truly occupying your attention right now, and make PARA reflect that, the power really begins to flow

You can’t change anything until you’re completely honest with yourself about what needs changing.

Every one is a Knowledge Worker. We are now entering the era of the Wisdom Worker.

Takeaway

This book is a quick read and the first part of the book is enough to get you started on PARA journey. As the author suggests, the second and third part of the book can be revisited later after you have played with PARA system for a bit. Since it is a short book, you can read cover-to-cover so that you can then figure how best to organize stuff based on your custom preferences. Since I was overlaying PARA over Zettelkasten method of notetaking AND ACE method of organizing the folders, I had many questions right away after reading the initial chapter. Some of them were answered in second and third parts of the book. My take is - there is no harm in giving it a try and see if it changes your workflow or thinking or just makes you life better. My bet is that it is going to make whatever be your current form or files/folder organization, far better by thinking through the principles mentioned in this book.