Master Your Week: The PARA Method for Ultimate Productivity

Today I'm going to teach you how to accomplish your most important work every single week using the PARA method, which is the most popular framework I've ever developed. In the previous two videos of this series, I introduced you to the four parts of Para Projects, areas, Resources and archives. In the last video, we created our project list together and learned how to avoid making projects that are bad, unclear, or actually demotivating. In this video, I'm going to show you how I use a list of projects in PARA to help guide my productivity at three different points in my the start of the week, during the week, and end of the week. First, let's talk about the start of the week. In my weekly review, there are a few places I can find my tasks. I can go to my calendar, I can check my email, I can clear my desktop or look at an existing to do list in my Task manager. But if I just do that, I'll tend to move forward only the most obvious, urgent or recent work, not necessarily my most important work, and I might end up redoing a lot of previous thinking that I've already captured elsewhere. So in addition to my more comprehensive weekly review, which I discuss in greater depth in the Building a Second Brain book and course, as well as in my other YouTube videos, I'm going to check out my project list inside the PARA system I showed you how to create in the previous videos. Let's go ahead and do that now. We have roughly 10 to 15 active projects you can see here. 15 projects. And because I put them through the project brainstorming process that I covered in depth in the last video of this series, I'm confident that they're all relevant, they're all well scoped and they're all important to me right now. This is where it's so important to have the same exact project list over here in your Task Manager and the same exact project list over here in your Notes app. They should be almost like a mirror, like two sides to the same coin. If you look at my screen, that's exactly what you see over here on the left sidebar of my Notes app. These projects which are collapsed under this project stack, it's the exact same projects as you see over here in the left sidebar of my Task manager. I insist on using the exact same project title with the same spelling, the same capitalization, the same punctuation, and I even use the same emoji so that as I'm switching back and forth between these two different programs, even the colors and the shapes of that emoji have help me make that switch easier. Just looking at this list is motivating to me. It's exciting to me. It's much more interesting and motivating than looking at a calendar or a to do list. I can see how for each of these projects, once I complete one, my whole business, my life, my priorities will move forward. So at the beginning of the week, I'll look at these projects and I'll just quickly highlight which of these I can move forward. It will probably only be a couple or a few in any given week, and that's okay. This tells me where to focus my attention and my efforts. And from this list of around 10 to 15 projects, I can sort of intuitively decide which ones are going to be the focus of my attention this week. The launch of my Building a Second Brain book in Brazil, since that is a trip that I'm making there in just a few weeks. The launch of the Paramethod, which also comes out in just a few weeks. The third one that jumps out at me is this one right here. A B2B initiative we're doing to bring second brain training into corporations and organizations. Three out of these dozen projects are far and away the most important and the most timely. So instead of spreading my time and my attention evenly over a dozen different projects, most of which are not important right now, or I can't even move forward this week if I wanted to, I'm going to focus from this point forward only on those three projects. So this is the launch of my book, the Paramethod, and in the United States, now that I've decided that this project is one of my three central priorities for this week, that gives me a kind of confidence. It gives me permission to get in here and dive into the details. And you'll notice there's a lot of content here. Look at how voluminous this is. There's 26 notes, a PDF of the full book. For the UK version. I have that list of podcasts that we saw before. I have a list of very precise edits that I made to the final version of the manuscript. I have some ideas, different ways of saying organizing by actionability, which I use at different points of the book. I have pull quotes that we can use to promote the book. I mean, it's really extensive. There's different ways that you can sort or order a list of notes. I could just sort of look through here and kind of click on things that seem interesting or that kind of catch my attention. And I do do that sometimes. But the one that I use the most and that I find by far the most valuable is to sort them by date created in reverse chronological order. Once I've activated this column here, and you can do that by right clicking and then selecting which columns you want to show, you can either sort them with the oldest node at the top, such as you see here, which would be chronologically, or you can sort them reverse chronologically. So by clicking on created again, it's going to put the most recent, the newest note at the very top and the oldest one at the bottom. You know, when you have a pile of papers, the ones on the bottom will be the oldest and the ones on the top will be the newest. And I like to sort of use that metaphor even when I'm working with digital notes. Generally, projects have this characteristic, which is the most recent things that you've saved or captured related to them are usually the most relevant. If I want to sort of load up the context or load up the details related to this project, I really only need to pay attention to the top of this list. I'll look at maybe the top three to five notes to see if there's anything that's pending that I need to take action on that I need to follow up on. So for example, I'll look at this one and recall that I just kind of saved this for my records. There's really no action I have to take. This was an email where my publisher gave me permission to use the images from the book for promotion. Again, that's just kind of for my records. This was the list of podcasts which I know I already have a task for. This is a list of last minute edits to the manuscript. Judging by the fact that they're all crossed out, I know that there is nothing I need to do here. Similar thing here. This was like the printing layout for the book. No action I have to take. After looking at the top of this list, I'm sort of satisfied. I can kind of confidently say that there's no lingering follow up tasks, little open loops that have slipped through the cracks that I have to take care of. That one is set, that one is good, that one is finished, at least for now, and move on to one of the other ones that I've identified as a main priority, which in this case is going to be the BASB Brazil launch. And for this project, as soon as I see the most recent note, which is the flight details from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo, that instantaneously activates or reminds me of a task that I have to do. So I'm going to copy. Right click Copy, the internal link, do a little quick capture window, and say, send Rio to Sao Paulo, flight details to parents, because they're actually coming with me, they will then be able to book the same flight. I'm going to hit tab, I'm going to hit paste command return, and there we go. You're probably wondering what is the endpoint of all this? And this is what I want to show you next. If I head over back to my task manager and let's say, within the Paramethod project, I've identified, let's say, these top three tasks that I actually want to do, eventually at some point you have to stop organizing things and actually do them. Once I've made that decision that I want to do, let's say these top three, I can select them and just hit command T. By hitting command T, see this little tiny yellow star that appears? Let's do that for these top three. And then let's say I go to the BASB Brazil launch project and I decide similarly to do that, that, and that. And then finally, the third priority for the week, which is our B2B initiative, let's say there's again three of these I want to take on. Why does that matter? What just happened? Well, by adding them to today, by marking them as today tasks, they now all appear in this new section, which I can reveal by clicking today over here on the left sidebar. It says today. But I really think of this as this week. And what it is is simply it's a subset. It's the small percentage of the hundreds of tasks you could theoretically do and represents the decision of the ones you've actually decided to do. And notice that these cut across projects. So this is a single, very compact, very succinct list that I can see all at one glance that is synchronized between my different devices, by the way. So if I generate this today list or this this week list on my computer and then I walk out the door, the very same list will be easily accessible on my phone and my tablet. I really can completely block out the world, not consider and ignore all the other things calling for my attention. This isn't a list of to dos that I just jotted down from what I could remember at some random time. They represent the endpoint, the final product of a very rigorous systematic review of the entire landscape of my life and my business. What I'm going to do next is simply start at the top, complete these tasks one at a time in order, and only once they're finished can I come up for air and start attending to all the things calling for my attention. Next, we'll talk about how my project list helps me throughout the week. So your project list is not just a planning tool. It's not just about trying to predict a kind of perfect future. It is an adaptation tool. It's a tool for taking in new information and change as it happens and being able to pivot on your heels and potentially go in a whole different direction that you didn't plan for. Let's say One of the tasks that I've chosen is to generate a list of books that have been adapted to TV shows. I may or may not be exploring the possibility of one day creating a TV show. Since this references a list, if I double click on it, it kind of makes sense that the list is right there. And here are a few that I've already taken note of. But often little possibilities and ideas and examples will bubble up during the week when I'm reading a book, if I'm watching tv, taking a walk by having this sort of running list, right? A dedicated defined place where ideas on this topic go where they belong when a new idea or example pops up. For example, one that just occurred to me is the Netflix show How to Get Rich by Ramit Sethi. I can just add it right there. This isn't just a static document that is one and done. It is actually an evolving, organic, ongoing, almost like collection point or hub of a particular kind of information, which in this case is about TV shows. Next, if I review any notes in a project folder and something sticks out at me, I'll often add a layer of progressive summarization which which I talked about in a previous video. So I was on a call with a collaborator in Brazil named Joo and you can see the date here was June 27th. And like anyone would, as we talked and discussed different aspects of our collaboration, I wrote down these notes. Now, it's been a few weeks and I've more or less forgotten pretty much everything we talked about. When it comes to notes like these, there's just a handful or maybe even one or two very important details that are buried. They're hidden among a big mass of ramp random stuff that is not so important. So what I'm going to do now that it's been a few weeks and I have a little bit of distance and perspective on what we discussed, I'm going to go through and just bold what is important. Following up on the VIP passes to this conference need to fly to this other city, the abbreviation of which is BH on the 24th. And then finally, there's a question here at the bottom, which is I wanted to know if we could move an event to another day. So there's essentially three points that are actually relevant now. Out of those three, by far the most important is this last one. Think about how often that's the case. The most important thing is at the bottom or at the end or at the back of a document, and you don't see it until it's too late. I want to prevent that by putting this in nice bright highlighter. And actually this is so important that I think I'll actually create an app, link control space bar, and email my Brazilian publisher about rescheduling the Casa Firjean event. Tab, paste and hit save. So this is an example of how I use progressive summarization to visually make the document so clear and so obvious. What is important, what is most unique, or what needs action so that the sensitive details don't get lost amid all the noise. A third way to use the project list is at the end of the week. If I've managed to complete a project during the week, I can follow what I call a project completion checklist, which I discuss more in my Building a Second Brain book and course, and then just archive the project away. But if the project is still ongoing, I'll use a technique I like to call the Hemingway Bridge. Ernest Hemingway, of course, was one of the most recognized novelists of the 20th century, and he was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the Hemingway Bridge. Here's how it works. Hemingway would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. Then, as soon as he knew what came next, he would stop before finishing his thought. That way, the next time he sat down to work on that story, instead of wondering where he should start or wondering what comes next, he knew exactly where to start. At the end of the week, I'm going to do the same thing. I like to capture any feelings of inspiration or ideas for Next Steps for the next time I work on that project in my Second Brain. Let's look at an example of how to do a Hemingway Bridge. One of my other important projects this Week is a B2B initiative. We're talking to several organizations and companies about how to BRINGING Building a second brain in our education into their companies. So what I'm going to do is create a new note in this project folder and simply call it Next Steps. Sometimes I also like to put the date and that is July 18, 2023. So I know when this Hemingway Bridge was created. Then I'm going to create bullet points and just jot down a few sort of almost like status updates. What has been done, what has been moved forward on this in the past week or two, not super extensive. This really shouldn't be long. I may now turn my attention to other things, for example my upcoming trip to Brazil and only revisit this initiative in a few months. When I do so this is exactly what I want to see. Exactly the last point. Where we left off, what we did, what we're waiting for, what happened, what we learn. What we need to know next. My future self won't have to spend a ton of energy wondering or thinking of where to pick up where I left off. If you want even more details, including more specific recommendations on using your areas resources and archives effectively, pick up a copy of my book the Para Method. In the next video of this series, I'll show you how to use the Para technique inside of Apple Notes so you can see a variation of my system outside of Evernote. Talk more soon.