Maybe this system works in a business environment where everything can be measured in terms of effectiveness such as achievements over time, but it doesn't work for me. It insists that projects need to have a fixed deadline. This is not true for creative professionals like me. If I'm writing a book, article, or a long-term software project setting a fixed deadline would be highly counter-productive. Some things are only finished when they are finished. Of course, this requires a certain amount of self-discipline, but that's something that no artificial deadline can give you anyway. Areas of responsibility are too unspecific to replace projects without a fixed deadline. Other activities could have a fixed deadline but shouldn't. To these belong small tasks that are part of a project that can be done whenever one feels in best shape doing it.
GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible, and I still think that's the right way to go. If you can, you should work items on your todo list in the order that best suits the context and current abilities.
I don't see anywhere that the author is suggesting that deadline must be explicitly defined up-front, or even be fixed. If you're writing something, it _will_ be done at some point (or is expected to be).
His other writings on the topic are very explicit about setting deadlines on every project and goal. Though, I don’t fully agree with the GP. Thiago also advocates freely changing deadlines as desired, so the deadlines become more a scheduling and prioritization helper than a typical deadlines.
A deadline is not the defining factor of a project; a clear definition of "done" is the defining factor. I have dozens of projects that have no specific deadline, but I know for sure when they will be done, because I will have achieved what I intended to do.
Agreed. Thiago's introductory PARA writings do seem to imply a strict deadline, but like the parent, I use a concrete definition of completion ("completability") as the defining characteristic of a project. If I can't do this, then it's a major red flag and there's some deeper problem and the thing either isn't a project (e.g. it's an "Area" - something you to want to maintain a standard on over time) or it's not well defined enough yet and there's prior work needed.
Case study: Frederico Vittici of MacStories recently wrote about revising his own system to eliminate deadline times from his system as unnecessary overhead that he'd picked up long ago. It was a case of an item from "someone else's system" which was adding stress for no benefit.
All organizational systems are really custom-fit jobs. Look at others' systems and understand the individual techniques and how they fit together. Then apply those to your situation. This is a bit like the advice to not just take someone's complicated dotfile setup (vim, shell, etc.) and add it to your own wholesale. Instead to learn and apply piece-by-piece, understanding that sometimes several pieces must "go in together" to make everything work as intended. (this also applies 100% to every single software team's process in my entire career, btw.)
> Some things are only finished when they are finished.
That's how you end with never ending and dying projects. Projects which are dragging for years and decades because the creator just does not "feel it" and at the end abandon them and never releases them. Thinking about the end goal is especially in creative work highly relevant. And a deadline is a good tool for this, as it forces you to think about. And a deadline can be changed, if done with good reasoning.
> GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible
GTD also makes a great point about reviewing and analyzing. And a deadline is a tool to force one to review and analyze a project, it's state and goals.
So, PARA or no, the thing that has worked really well for me (14 months so far) is Thiago’s idea for weekly/monthly/annual reviews. This has really been the important gem for me, and while PARA helps define a framework for that, it would work with any organization method.
Basically, weekly reviews are tactical, where you can mostly mechanically prioritize the upcoming week and clear out your inboxes. Monthly are more strategic, where you take a wider look at the status of all projects, consider modifying, canceling, or reprioritizing them. And annual reviews are the same thing but addressed at the highest level of your life; you might think of it as a formalization of New Years Resolutions.
Since adopting a schedule of these reviews I have felt much more in control of my projects and work, and the time investment is about 1 hour a month to do.
I first read about regular reviews in David Allen's "Getting things Done", I think.
I agree though, a periodic project review is a must.
I also find scheduled "brain dump" check list super helpful. Basically, a bunch of questions amounting to "what am I forgetting", by listing all the generic categories I'm responsible for (like "Am I forgetting to pay a bill", "are there any house maintenance items outstanding"). Allows me to unload anything that I'm unconsciously holding on to in my working memory.
Yep. I actually purchased a subset of his blog in Praxis Volume 2, which has three chapters dedicated to the topic. And, frankly, I didn’t really care for the rest of the book, but it was worth it for those three chapters.
I’ve been very loosely using PARA for a while, and the two (small) factors that have had the biggest benefit for me are:
- Every “project”, no matter how small, gets its own folder. This means I’m no longer hunting for files (“Did I save that to my desktop? Is it in my email?”)
- Replicate and manually “sync” the folder structure between programs (in my case, OneNote for notes, OneDrive for files, and Microsoft Tasks for…tasks). This gives the freedom to use the best tool for the job, rather than trying to find one tool that does everything, but means you still have a consistent organization structure.
These both seem somewhat obvious in retrospect, but they’ve been very helpful for me.
We use a modified version of this system for my six-person team. For the first two folder levels, we use numeric folder notation with a max of 10 folders for each level. We do allow for deeper levels as needed. For example, we often need a bunch of folders for data.
When an article starts by saying that it has found the "perfect way" to do something, the article is usually disappointing.
First personal knowledge management is not a new field, it was just called "note taking" before.
Second the place where you really need to manage knowledge is at your job. Using a system that requires discipline at work is usually a bad idea as most people are not disciplined. Also at work information is spread around different applications which makes sorting all information about everything into folders difficult
Finally if that method works for the author then good, but I also have also method that works for me which is : try to take notes of almost nothing
> First personal knowledge management is not a new field, it was just called "note taking" before.
That's not really the same. Note-taking is simply the act of recording something. While knowledge management aims for the systematic approach and is an established academic discipline with a very long history. Though, of course not every random system some guru wants to sell has this level of research and quality. And I wouldn't put PARA there either.
> Second the place where you really need to manage knowledge is at your job.
Depends on your job and live. Most people use PKM for their own hobbies and daily stuff. Work-Knowledge is of course also a big area, but not the only one, often not even the dominating one.
> Using a system that requires discipline at work is usually a bad idea as most people are not disciplined.
Which is the point where a system can help.
> Finally if that method works for the author then good, but I also have also method that works for me which is : try to take notes of almost nothing
So what? Can't the author wrote about their methods just because you have yours?
"When an article starts by saying that it has found the 'perfect way' to do something, the article is usually disappointing."
That sounds like a "you" problem?
Apologies if this sounds like an attack, but I see enough of it here that I think it's worth commenting on. It should be obvious that 'perfect way' means "way that the author really likes and is very confident in, and therefore wants to share it."
And not "scientifically proven" or some silliness.
Honestly it doesn’t seem pernickety to evaluate the article on its claims. The system is presented as “universal”, and the opening sentence asks us to enumerate the qualities of a perfect system that would work for everyone.
I'd argue it's not pernickety to highlight the underhandedness of branding something as a "universal system" if that system applies to an indeterminable but likely small percentage of readers.
This is unlikely to work. Why? Whenever you impose a stringent system of categorization on top of information that eludes easy categorization, you will likely fail. “I’ll handle the edge cases” — that’s not an easy task. The edge cases add up, until all you are left with is edge handling. This reminds me of someone who lives in a theoretical, platonic plane without consideration for real world problems.
A system that has a higher success of working is developed organically, from the bottom up. I’d say Zettelkasten is one such example, though its primary beneficiaries are researchers in text-heavy fields (e.g. sociology).
I've never been convinced by very structured digital information systems. I usually have reference documents for projects, but they end up looking very different for each project. Lists of TODOs, a directory with images and documents, random ideas an small notes, more structured text, source code, source code with data, a notebook with random notes and thought ...
For task and calendar management GTD has everything I need, and try to keep the system as simple as possible, usually in paper and just moving a few things to digital if it really adds value. Then the project reference material itself can be more messy and be used to generate new next actions and other GTD items, as long as GTD itself is kept tidy the chaos in the reference material doesn't have much impact in the general planning.
most people ignore that in our history, in various moments, many have crafted "universal systems" to organize information, few historical examples:
- ~612 BC Ashurbanipal di Nineveh tablets, sort of structured tag-based library with more than 30k tags found, mostly used to note transactions and other daily life activities
- ~245 BC Callimacus pínakes, another sort of tag-based index for the Alexandria giant library
- ~1545 Conrad Gessner libraries of Babel, personal notes closely similar to "modern" ZettelKasten
- 1673-94 Leibniz's Scrinium Literatum another far similar to Gessner's one and ZK
- 1934 Paul Otlet & Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum, so-called the modern web ancestor
- 1960 Niklas Luhmann's ZettelKasten
Those are just few I remember but there are many others and surely many more not lost in the history. All claim to be universal and all have an ultimate goal: store&retrieve information as easily as possible to produce new one, to evolve. All are closely similar in principles (usage of meta-information, cataloguing techniques of various kind, keep individual "entries" small for easy isolation and composing etc). The web (1.0 so called) is the first general and global example of those systems. All fails though at a certain point.
Long story short: there is no universal method to be followed slavishly expecting magic results, there are common needs, normally solved in closely similar ways with the tools of the time for millennia, the best option is understand the problem and the principle behind all those solutions tailoring one on our needs.
Personally I use Emacs/org-mode/org-roam and various other related package to manage my personal information, suffering a bit by the lack of a more flexible storage than files and filesystems, but still enough to manage almost anything so effectively that I can't use modern desktops/sw anymore, it's not PARA, ZK etc but just another systems, without strict rules, tailored on my needs following the similar principles of all others. Popular modern one are LYT https://youtu.be/RgwnpEBFNUg or Jonny Decimal.
I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:
There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!
Thanks for these insights and listing these alternatives in one place and showing their commonalities (like tagging, hierarchies, and parsing/subdividing). One book I have found interesting along those lines is "The Discipline of Organizing".
https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/tdo4p/
Tangentially, William Kent's "Data and Reality" (the first two editions especially) also explores the larger meta-issues of moving from human-ish nuanced thinking to more limited formal representations (i.e. "The map is not the territory").
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I have my own FOSS explorations to make software related to these sorts of themes called Pointrel/Twirlip -- but still a work in progress after over forty years. Indirectly Pointrel did in a sense help inspire Wordnet though. :-) And Wordnet was core to the rise of Google (via Adsense) which claims to want to organize the world's information (even if they may have other goals as well).
I kind of expected all kinds of digital information... not just "todo" lists and projects for your life... where does knowledge/ideas/CRM/"artifacts"/bookmarks/emails+communications and all sorts of other digital information go?
Google almost instantly index posts that appear on the front page. And it even gives them a high ranking so if you go in Google search console you will see a peak traffic from Google search at the time the post is on the front
While new acronyms are born every year for the productivity/organizational world, I personally believe it all is the same thing that is taught by the greats like Peter Drucker & Orison Swett Marden. You have people like Brian Tracy, David Allen, Kop Kopmeyer, Zig Ziglar, and many more that expose you to these success principles. Some through organizational method, some through mindset.
The most important principle? You find an expert who will take you by the hand and give you the success formulas. You can do that through reading in many cases in which you then add your own special tweaks to improve it. If you read a number of books in the topic of information organization, you'll realize that these people who are "experts" are really just in the same position as the people before them with their own special tweaks to improve the previous generation's work.
This is the trap of productivity. You find a system and fail to figure out how to change your behavior to take advantage of it. Instead, think in systems and deconstruct what makes said system great and apply that slowly to your life. For example a great concept is having a “information capture system” of some sort. Now go figure out your own unique version of that.
Well look at the post for example. The author is explaining their system of the specific apps and flows they use. Are they the right apps or flows? That’s up to you.
Personally I don’t think of Tiago Forte as a productivity expert. He just happens to be a social media personality that does productivity stuff. Like other “productivity gurus” on social media, if you pay close enough attention they switch their systems regularly. Maybe it’s to have fresh content, who knows. I think it is because they fell in the trap.
It’s all FOMO at a certain point. Like the pioneers I mentioned earlier, their advice is to not be afraid to do your own thing even if the masses are going in the other direction.
The main PIM challenge for me, besides naming things, is discoverability. If I have a system where I put stuff in, how do I find it again? After a few years I certainly have forgotten that I had a link to this one article a friend showed me about obscureTopicX in there?
I've been using Obsidian, where notes can be linked and viewed as a graph, which is great for accidental discovery. I mostly use its full text search, though.
What is interesting with this method is that it seems to work effortlessly even on the personal side.
I always found easy to maintain an organization when it is shared ; it is the only way to keep the communication easy.
Much harder for personal files and projects, which always end up in a big mess…
I may give it a try, but I wonder if it is not just another method that will add to the existing mess.
I can't say I use the PARA system totally, but I do use the naming structure. I have a projects and archives folder in my personal google drive, and in Roam, and in my work google drive and I make sure follow a naming convention for all of them, so that I generally know where to find things.
The Reference vs Areas I've never really understood though. So that part works less well for me.
I've found it to be pretty helpful, though I don't use it for code. That simplification is worth the price of admission for me.
I did try "PARA" but found it a little bulky.. I've been working with Johnny decimal, have you read about it ? what are your thoughts on decimal ( https://johnnydecimal.com/ )? Do you think its worth switching and enduring the change for an information worker ?
I hadn't heard of it, but it's straightforward enough. Johnny decimal seems to work best for communication between multiple people, it's like a lightweight way of having human-implementable URLs.
The thing with PARA is that information falls into different buckets according to their use, not their topic. You're in a completely different mindset when you're looking up old stuff for reference (archives), remembering that bash command you use once a month (resources), etc.
On a first impression / hunch, your decimal system seems to have the failure mode that your old finances live right next to your current finances. Thus, the size of your context / working window just grows and grows without bounds, becoming unwieldy over time. With PARA, the idea is that a project folder contains data if and only if you need it to work on that project.
A very low-cost way of trying it out is to just implement the 2nd A (archives). That's by far the most important.
“Areas” is for material that outlives specific projects and might be useful again later. The idea is that when you finish a project, you go through the project folder and move relevant materials into Areas or Resources for later reference.
GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible, and I still think that's the right way to go. If you can, you should work items on your todo list in the order that best suits the context and current abilities.