The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life

Author: Tiago Forte

Image courtesy of stablediffusionweb

Citation: Forte, T. (2023). The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life. Atria Books.

🤷🏽 Why this book?

It’s a modest (some might say, boring) book about an organizing method that transformed my life. Ultimately, it’s about leading the life you want to live. The PARA method was first presented in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. In adopting PARA, you’ll learn and reinforce behaviors and mindsets that invite you to be more aware and, therefore, intentional about where you’re directing your energy and to what end. This book is for you if you have ever wondered where you put a critical file or folder. 😑

💡Key Ideas

• PARA is about organizing information for action—whether needed in the moment or years into the future.

  • Projects: Things you are actively working on with a goal and a deadline.

  • Areas (of Responsibility): The roles you play, such as parent, partner, musician, teacher, house manager, etc. For each role, there are areas like health, finance, or your side hustle for which there is an “ongoing standard to maintain over time.”

    • Note that this information is private to you.

  • Resources: These are your interests and curiosities that are shareable with others. You might collect recipes, ukulele music, or dinosaur facts. 🦖

    • Be ruthless in keeping only truly unique or useful information. Avoid information hoarding.

  • Archives: Everything else goes here: “Cold storage for your digital life.”

    • Let go of preconceived notions of what your Archives will look like. You may have thousands of folders and files; surprisingly, the exact one you need months or years later surfaces quickly.

• The PARA method is cross-platform and tool-agnostic because our work and lives span multiple platforms and tools—and that trend will continue.

  • Important: The key to making this work is to ensure your digital tools are organized using the same PARA structure and naming conventions, whether it’s your note-taking app, task management app, digital cloud storage, or computer hard drive.

🤭 Surprises:

• It doesn't matter where you put a given file or that you have precisely four PARA categories. What’s most important is to separate out actionable and timely information to give it your attention and get things done.

• The #1 Most Common Error: Most people use a different organizing structure and naming convention in every place they keep information (think: iCloud, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, ToDoist, Trello, Things3, Asana, Teamwork, Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, etc.).

  • This is a problem because every system has cognitive overhead to maintain and use it. You work harder than needed when your systems are organized and named differently. Do you really want to work harder?

• Being organized makes you powerful. It comes from the strength of your intellect, the force of your emotions, and alignment. He writes:

Getting organized, in my opinion, is about acquiring power… It all depends on your ability to draw power from every source available to you and direct it toward the outcomes you want.

✅ Conclusion

Everyone experiences information overload. In our lives and work, we strive to achieve goals and produce results—whether improving our health, taking our family on the vacation of a lifetime, or publishing a report. More often than not, our results depend on millions of bits of information from conversations, chat messages, books, podcasts, notes, reports, and videos scattered across so many platforms that we wonder where we put it hours, days, or weeks later.

We hit a wall if physical libraries inspire our mental model for managing our personal digital information. Organizing by topic or date with folders within folders may work for a few, but not most. Digital information flows continuously. It is both-and not either-or. This is because as we change over time, so does our relationship to information. Last year’s home renovation project in Archives can become seeds for a new book you’ll move into Projects next month.

PARA meets you where you are and grows with you. It is a simple, flexible structure for maintaining your unique, inspiring, and important personal information so that it flows with you through the river of life. ⛵

👉 Recommended Resources

• The PARA Method (Forte Labs blog post)

• Organize Your Digital Life Using PARA (Forte Labs YouTube playlist)

Rating (out of 4): 🌟 🌟 🌟

Note: It is rated 3 out of 4 because it supplements the initial explanation from Building a Second Brain, which you should absolutely, definitely read first if being organized makes your heart sing. 💓