Most of what we do is knowledge work - That entails having thoughts, writing them down in a coherent way and presenting them. I think many people, myself included, experience surges of inspiration and write alot, or make notes while working on a project. But then next time a similiar project comes up its as if we start over. Its difficult to find the old notes or understand how we reached the conclusions we did. Furthermore our information may be scattered all over the place, some in a handwritten meeting note, some in a google docs, some in an email (we have 5 different of these).
The whole goal of the PARA method is to avoid these issues by having a “Single Source of Truth”. This may seem quite lofty, but really it is just about having a system that can capture all the necessary information and where we can easily find information when we need it.
The Workflow in the PARA method is easy. Every thought we have or written work we complete can be categorized into one of 4 domains:
- Projects
- Areas
- Resources
- Archive
To continue this guide go to 02 Distinguish between PARA elements