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Insight or Idea
There are more in depth reasons why PARA may be a good method but this insight is specifically why it works for me and my needs.
I use PARA to reduce friction by flattening out folder structures. Navigating folders can be hectic, and content can get buried. Additionally, categorization like that tends to be fluid and changing. Here’s an example
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gap-between-notes#^groupdsgwsiip2biryigin725oI may originally think splitting my folders into Personal and Work make a lot of sense. But as a create new notes, I actually realize it’s more useful to me to switch the categories to Computing and Productivity right?
Well that’s also arbitrary. And thinking back to what we mentioned before, I want something that fits my note taking and consuming experience. I don’t consume or write notes based on where they exist, I interact with notes based on their purpose. This is why PARA works especially well from this perspective.Circular transclusion detected: 2-Areas/__assets/my-note-taking-system
You can see here now my notes or organized more on how I’m thinking about them than what they can be categorized as. This is where an implementation of PARA works well.Circular transclusion detected: 2-Areas/__assets/my-note-taking-system
P → Projects: If I’m ever looking for projects with end dates in mind that I’m actively working on I can go to this section for that A → Areas: If I have an ongoing series of notes that have no end planned those can be together to aggregate insights. R → Resources: Full sources/links/resources can live together as a sort of ingestion and aggregation section A → Archive: A dumping ground for content that’s no longer being actively used
Additionally I have a Raw notes section I call Inbox for anything that needs to find a home but for now just needs to be written down.
This leads to an incredibly streamlined way of creating notes, and we’ve effectively reduced friction. However in terms of gaining insights or creating new ideas, this still doesn’t really encourage that, it leads to lots of notes being taken but not a lot of ideas being generated or connections being made.