What is PARA?

If you’re familiar with knowledge management or the concept of a “second brain”, you’ve likely heard of the PARA method. In a nutshell, PARA is a system for organizing your documents and, presumably, your knowledge. Its core idea is to use four main folders (or five, if you include an INBOX): Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.

• Projects: This folder holds active projects. Each sub-folder represents a separate project with a clear goal, steps, and target date.
• Areas: This folder contains areas of responsibility that require ongoing maintenance and have no definite end date.
• Resources: This is where you store data you’re interested in and have collected.
• Archives: This folder is for anything no longer active.

The idea is that when you start working on something, you treat it as a project and gather all related materials into the corresponding project folder. Meanwhile, when you collect external materials, they go into the INBOX folder first. From there, you move them into the appropriate folder: Projects, Areas, or Resources.

This approach offers several benefits:

1. You don’t need to worry about where to immediately place external materials; just drop them in the INBOX.
2. You establish a routine for moving items from the INBOX to a designated location based on your current work.
3. You gain easy access to all materials needed for your current project, allowing you to focus on what’s most important.

How PARA Helps Me

PARA has significantly benefited me, especially in my work. As a software engineer, I manage multiple projects through milestones. PARA’s GTD nature helps organize my documents, allowing me to focus more on thinking than on remembering where things are.

I particularly appreciate the easy access PARA provides.

If you understand how computers work, you might be familiar with memory hierarchy and spatial locality. When relevant information is stored close together, computers access it faster. This is why data is loaded from hard disks to memory, and then to caches.

The same principle applies to our brains and how we organize documents. We want the information we need readily accessible in our minds. However, due to our brain’s capacity, this isn’t always possible, especially when a topic involves materials from different sources at different times. Storing all relevant materials within a single, active project folder is essentially optimizing for spatial locality. This makes it much easier to prepare for tasks or quickly find information during meetings.

What PARA is Not

As mentioned, PARA is fundamentally a GTD framework. It’s excellent for helping you complete tasks more efficiently. However, it’s not a perfect knowledge management framework. It doesn’t emphasize the format of materials, which is good for easy capture but not ideal for long-term maintenance. It also doesn’t focus on linking knowledge, making it harder to uncover connections between your existing notes.

Consider the practical issue of reading two books on the same topic at the same time. If both book-reading projects mention “Machine Learning,” you’ll likely have separate notes on this concept in two different project folders. There’s no built-in routine to merge these similar concepts into a single note. While you can mitigate this with extra processing during archiving, it seems like a limitation stemming from its GTD core.

Summary

PARA is a valuable project management framework. It offers many benefits, but its GTD focus means it’s not the ideal system for comprehensive knowledge management.