(2017-02-08) Forte Para Method A Universal System For Organizing Digital Information

Tiago Forte: The P.A.R.A. Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information. I believe I’ve developed a system for organizing digital information

P.A.R.A. stands for Projects — Areas — Resources — Archives, the four top-level categories that encompass every type of information you might encounter in your work and life

A project is “a series of tasks linked to a goal, with a deadline

An area of responsibility is “a sphere of activity with a standard to be maintained over time.” (cf Area Balanced Living)

A resource is “a topic or theme of ongoing interest.”

Archives include “inactive items from the other three categories.”

We spend our days completing tasks, which are grouped naturally into projects, which fall under areas of responsibility

I want to zero in on the difference between projects and areas of responsibility. After much trial and error, and seeing many people struggle to differentiate between them, I’ve come to believe that even the smallest confusion between these two categories is a deeply rooted cause of many personal productivity problems.

A project has a goal to be achieved. (Goal Setting)

And this goal is supposed to take place by a specific moment in time

An area of responsibility, by contrast, has a standard to be maintained. And there is no end date or final outcome

Projects always fall into Areas.

When working with a client as a productivity coach, one of the first things I will ask them is to show me their Project List.

Not a single item on this list is a project.

There are three absolutely critical things you cannot do unless you break out your areas of responsibility into clearly articulated projects.

The first is that you can’t truly know the extent of your commitments:

Second, you can’t connect your current efforts to your long-term goals:

Knowledge work requires not only our time and effort, but also our engagement and creativity. For that reason, personal motivation is the prime problem that supersedes all other problems.

Now, imagine the psychological effect of waking up to the list on the left day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year.

I couldn’t design a better method of killing personal motivation if I tried

Remember that there is no inherent structure or unit of work. You don’t have to accept your manager’s, teams, or organization’s definitions of what a project is!

Third, you can’t know if you’re making progress toward your goals:

One final note on projects vs. areas: they require completely different ways of thinking, approaches, tools, and methods.

failing to make this distinction leads to common frustrations

once you’ve taken the time to formulate a clear Project List. Put it side by side with your Goal List, and draw lines matching each project with its corresponding goal

What most people find is that they don’t completely match. This is problematic because a project without a corresponding goal is known as a “hobby.”

And if you have a goal without a corresponding project, that’s called a “dream.”

Start by defining your project list

*you should define your projects apart from any particular program or tool. Write them down on a piece of paper or in a blank document, away from the hints, incentives, constraints, and assumptions of any software program.

What this allows you to do is extend and manifest these projects across any program you choose*

Here’s why this is important: you will always need to use multiple programs to complete projects.

Instead of fighting the tide and looking for “one platform to rule them all,” formulate your Project List and then replicate that list across every single tool you use, now and in the future. I recommend doing so down to the exact same spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, so that your transitions between programs are as seamless as possible.

P.A.R.A. gives you the best of both worlds: the consistency of centralization, with the adaptability of decentralization.

It operates according to three core principles:

The first principle is that it uses the number 4 as a guidepost. The entire hierarchy is four categories wide (projects, areas, resources, archives), and no more than four levels deep (using Evernote as an example, the levels would be: application > stacks > notebooks > notes).

The second principle is that P.A.R.A. perfectly mirrors your task management and project management systems. The relatively young field of personal knowledge management (PKM) has a lot to say on the topic, but I believe that any PKM approach that doesn’t tie into execution tools is destined to languish on the back burner forever.

The third principle is that P.A.R.A. preserves and actually enhances the most important distinction that any productivity system must make: between actionable and non-actionable information

How does it enhance actionability? By recognizing that actionability is not black or white. It is instead a gradient, a spectrum that should be hidden or revealed depending on the context.

Day to day, in the trenches of getting things done, you might focus on the first column, looking at material related only to the active projects

On a wider horizon, for example, while doing a weekly review, you would expand the scope of information you’re considering to include Areas of Responsibility.

On an even wider horizon, perhaps during a monthly review, you could expand the scope of what you’re looking at to include Resources

And finally, the Archives are your portfolio of completed projects, each one inactive but ready to offer up potentially useful material to reuse and recycle in future projects

This post is a prototype of a new media format I’m planning on launching (Media Inventor): an ebook with embedded videos.