Organize Your ENTIRE Digital Life in Seconds (The PARA Method)

Let me introduce you to para, the organizing system that I use to organize information across my entire digital life. This is the single most popular framework I've ever developed and in this video I'm going to show you how it works. Most people overcomplicate their note taking and knowledge management because they don't have a framework that helps them make decisions about where things should go. They have to remember a complex set of rules or redo decisions over and over again. Instead, I want you to create a workflow that you can follow every single time you create a new note or save a new document. That workflow follows the four letters of Para your projects, areas, resources and archives. Let's talk more about each one. Projects are any outcome you're actively committed to that requires multiple work sessions to complete projects. Projects have two important features. First, they have an outcome, a goal that you're trying to reach. And second, projects end. They have a deadline or a time frame you want to complete them by. The key thing to notice about projects is that they're important. They're actionable right now. They're action oriented and short term in focus. Some examples Writing a new blog post Reorganizing a part of your house Potty training a dog Planning a vacation trip. Each of these endeavors will require different kinds of information, notes and resources. Research plans, schedules and you'll need a way to track the thoughts and ideas that you have over time. I'll show you my current projects and how I organize them shortly. Second Areas an area is a role or a responsibility that you have that has a standard you want to maintain over time. Areas are never really complete. There's no goal that you reach and check off that thing forever. The key thing to notice about areas. They're important and relevant on an ongoing basis, including right now. But unlike projects, they're also important later too. They aren't quite as actionable as projects, but still require attention. For example, in your finances, you might need to keep track of taxes for your health, it could be your weight or cholesterol for your relationship with your significant other, gift ideas or favorite places that you might want to visit together. So you see, even though you can't complete an area, it's still important to be able to track your ideas and your information and your dreams and your wishes over time for each area. Third, we have resources. Resources is really any topic of ongoing interest or any kind of just useful reference, and they're basically like a catch all for everything else that isn't something you need to keep track of right now for, say, a project or an area, but it might be interesting in the future. They are low on actionability. They're waiting to be activated later for future projects or future areas that they could contribute to. A few examples Interesting subjects you'd like to learn more about Random interests and hobbies Places you'd like to visit one day Content or quotes or information related to architecture or books you've read. It can really be anything. Sometimes these resources are for fun or just in case. Other times they're very practical, like recipes or case studies for your business, or photos for a future project, even if it's not something you're committed to right now. Fourth, we have the archives. Your archives are just inactive items from any of the three previous categories. Think of them like cold storage. They're almost completely unactionable, just waiting there in case you need to find or reference them sometime in the future. The key for archives is that whenever a project becomes inactive, you don't want to delete that material. There's no reason to delete anything these days, just archive it. That way it can still be searched for later, can be accessible whenever you have a notes app available, such as on your computer, your tablet, or your smartphone. But in the meantime it won't clutter up your workspace and distract your focus. I put resources and projects into the archives pretty often, but projects are the most commonly archived because they have a built in completion date. It's rare that I'd archive an entire area, but it does happen. For example, if I have a big life change or decide to change my priorities. This is how I organize my notes and all my files. And the key is that I can have all of these categories in every single part of my life. I have the exact same system in Google Drive, on my personal computer, among other places. The purpose of Para is really to answer the question how do I organize my notes and files once and for all? And therefore to minimize the amount of time I'm spending spending making that decision every day, focusing on taking action instead of constantly reorganizing things. Let me give you a little tour of what my own Para system looks like day to day. What you see on the screen is my digital note taking app, which is Evernote. Been using it for years. I just clicked here on the left where it says Notebooks. Notebooks is what Evernote calls folders. Some note taking systems also use tags which work just as well. Many thousands of notes. I think I have more than six or seven thousand notes. They all fit into just four Very straightforward, clear categories. Think about how amazing that is that thousands of discrete pieces of information can be easily sorted into four groups, projects, areas, resources, and archives. I like to put a number before each 1, 1, 2, 3, and 4, so that they appear in this order from most actionable to least actionable. Before we dive into what is contained within each of these pair of categories, take a look at this number in parentheses after so think of this number one projects as a folder, and then within that big folder there are a number of smaller subfolders, one for each active project. I typically find that most people have somewhere between 15 and 25 projects. That might actually seem like a lot, but if you take the time to really list out all the different goals and outcomes that you're working toward, 15 to 25 is quite a standard number. So you can see here that I have 19 currently active projects, my taxes for last year, I have a blog post that I'm working on, I have cohorts of my online course, I have the book that I'm launching, 18 notes related to my son's education plan, all sorts of different things. And once again, look at the numbers in parentheses for an idea of how much information I'm keeping for each one of these projects. It ranges from zero, so you can tell I really have not even started on the research for this article that I'm writing all the way to some that have 25 or 30 or the biggest one of all, which is the book I've been working on for a couple years, which is 71 notes. Let's just take a look at the notes contained within one of these project folders. If I look at the brand identity design that we've been creating for Building a Second Brain, for example, I can see all sorts of things, from brainstorms around different words that we wanted to use in our branding, to some notes on fair use. There's imagery from Pinterest that we might want to draw on all sorts of different things that anytime I'm working on this project, I want to just be able to click one place and have these notes displayed before me. Let's go back to Notebooks, close the project stack, which is what this is called within Evernote, and let's take a look at areas. This is really every single area of my life that I have information to keep track of. All the ones that start with FL are business related. FL stands for Forte Labs, my company. And you can see it ranges from my son, to our car, to finances, my health, my wife, my personal development, those are all the personal ones. And then on the business side, there's administrative stuff. There is notes related to our course, related to email, related to legal, marketing people, the studio where we're filming this right now, our website. These are kind of like the two halves of my life, My personal life and my professional life. Let's close the area stack. Take a look at resources. So here's kind of everything else. All the other topics and subjects that I'm interested in, from climate change to marketing to design to music, neuroscience. Other ones are more like assets, like stock photos. So this is kind of a grab bag, a catch. All of very diverse kinds of information. The important thing is that none of this is particularly actionable. It's all kind of just in case it's when needed. As needed. Let's take a look at what's contained within, say, a resource notebook on habits and behavior change. So I have notes from an article called the Art of Laser Focus. I have notes from a paper on something called the Good Art Effect. I have highlights from an article called Habits vs Goals. Think about how useful this is. When the time comes, and this might be rare, that I really want to look at my habits and my routines. I really want to change my routines. I don't have to spend hours trying to find all the different things I've read and heard in the past about habits. It's all here in one centralized place. And I could actually get this entire notebook, retitle it to a project like, you know, start a meditation routine or create a morning routine or some specific outcome that I'm trying to achieve. And I could move the entire notebook from the resources straight right over here to the projects in one step. Let's go back to notebooks. Collapse the resources and take a look at archives. Archives is the cold storage. There's more notebooks in archives than all the others combined. And that's the way it should be, right? Archives is everything you've done in the past. Everything I've done in the past is way more extensive than the stuff that I'm working on right now. So everything from, you know, past year's taxes to old apartments that I was looking for, to previous cohorts of my course. There's so many things that I've done in the past. I really only go in here if there's a specific thing that I'm looking for. But just scrolling through this list is such a blast from the past. It's such a walk down memory lane through all the very diverse, interesting things that I've been involved with in the past. It's actually inspiring to me. It reminds me of the breadth of experience that I have. It's almost like my portfolio. It's like a resume of all the stuff that I've done and achieved in the past. Except instead of, you know, one page resume with some lines of text, I can click into any one of these and see, for example, all the details about the apartment that we had in Mexico, how to transfer money to my landlord in Mexico. Who knows if this will ever be relevant again, but if it ever is. Or let's say I have a friend who moves to Mexico and wants some advice. I know exactly where it's found and it will always be here for my safekeeping. So this is my digital note taking app that I've just shown you, and I think of my notes app as kind of the neural center of my second brain. It's the core of it. But the whole purpose of para, the power of it, is that you can use it everywhere. What you really don't want to do is have a completely different organizing philosophy in each one of the many dozens of places where you keep information. In the next few videos of this series, I'll show you step by step how to create your project list, how to actually move your notes into the Para categories, and even app specific workflows for how to use Para in different kinds of apps and different digital environments. Thanks for watching and talk more soon.