The PARA Method by Tiago Forte Book Summary
By now many people are familiar with Tiago Forte and his book Building a Second Brain.
In that book he introduces the organization method for all of the applications within the second brain system called PARA, which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.
This 2023 follow up called The Para Method is a deeper dive into the structure with plenty more hidden gems of insight throughout the text.
This book was supposed to be one I read in February. I happened to start it a week early and finished before February even started.
In this book Tiago leads off with 5 strong promises…
I definitely hit a wall this past year with YouTube, where I was highly motivated, until i had kind of information overload going where there were too many ideas to execute on and i couldn't pick a path.
I wasn't treating each video like a project. My YouTube channel folder was in my Areas, each video effectively was only a "note". A small but important distinction. I was thinking about my YouTube channel as an area because it does not have a start and end point, however each video does. Each video is a project that moves the goals associated with having a Youtube channel forward. Those goals include monetization, making a certain number of videos each year and stirring my creativity in filming and videography.
This distinction is tough and plenty of people struggle with it as well.
I had a similar experience looking for something I thought would be in Resources. I have a table of camera settings for my two Sony cameras. I wanted to reference something before setting up to shoot. I search resources and...nothing. Turns out I had put the file in my Photography area, which made sense to me at the time. Search was my saving grace here, but the distinction Tiago makes between Areas and Resources in this book helped me to do some revamping of my folder structure.
I would share this information with anyone who asked if I had base ISO settings for Sony cameras, therefore it really should have gone in Resources to start, which was my initial gut feel in the first place. Needless to say, I still have some cleanup to do and am learning as I go every day.
This is part of the clarity I had when realizing I should setup projects for each small thing. Stacking small wins as projects helps drive the main goal along.
Creating folders and filing things away neatly is a waste of time. Saving information that is helpful to driving forward the projects and build the future you want is not time wasted.
Its ok to start over.
I am close to doing this with my task manager Todoist. I've got loads of folders and tasks in there, plenty of recurring items that I ignore on a weekly basis and reschedule when they come up. I am not productive when I use the app and nothing about how I have it structured at the moment excites me to make progress on my projects.
Tiago highlights an exercise to help clarify things further on in the book. I did this exercise and will do it again.
Then follow that up with these questions:
This gets you started if you are already using the PARA system or if you are setting it up for the first time. These exercises will highlight to you everything that you have going on in your life and you can create folders for what projects, resources and areas you have information to put in. I wish I would have recognized earlier that creating folders that are blank is a waste of time and cause additional confusion when you inevitably go searching for something.
I have a fairly complex system for productivity. Recently I find myself wanting to simplify this again. One to-do application and one notes app. I know that while that sounds good, it is not realistic or feasible to connect all of the different services that I do use. Some level of fragmentation will always exist, especially when using physical media, books, writings, etc.
I found the PARA method book to be a refreshing read that I breezed through. It helped me take a step back and observe the PARA system I had setup and make some small but important changes to how I had been operating. Less of a firefighting mode and more strategic, creating and stacking small wins for myself by breaking up long term goals (Areas) into bite sized pieces (Projects) that I can complete and feel good about.
