Business Book Review: The PARA Method by Tiago Forte

PARA is more than a system for organising your digital life. It’s a way to highlight the true extent of your commitments and call your desired future self into being.

My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 206 pages
Publisher: Profile Books
Released: 2023

Key Takeaways for Personal Branding

Tiago Forte backs up his best-seller Building a Second Brain with The PARA Method. The book dives into one of the key frameworks for building a second brain. It’s a short and sweet guide, and Forte himself says even reading the first five chapters alone is all you need for this ultimate organisation method. While he’s right, you won’t want to skip any of it.

What is PARA?

PARA, a digital organisation framework, is made up of four categories to encompass your entire life:

P: Projects are short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on right now. They have an end goal.

A: Areas are your long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time.

R: Resources are topics that interest you that you might be interested in the future.

A: Archives are inactive items from the other three categories.

The acronym aligns nicely with the Greek word Para, meaning “side by side” or “parallel”.

School conditions you to organise your information according to the topic. However, the PARA system is centred around the mantra of “organise for action”.

As the world moved away from physical folders, which took up space and had to be organised, digital files promote relentless clutter that drains your mental energy.

The book highlights that this is more than just semantics. The distinctions allow you to fully understand the extent of your commitments. Otherwise, you can’t connect your current efforts to your long-term goals.

PARA is more than a system for organising too; it’s a system for motivation and achievement:

“When you break down your responsibilities into bite-size projects, you ensure that your project list is constantly turning over. This turnover creates a cadence of regular victories that you get to celebrate every time you successfully complete a project.”

Sprints and Marathons

The PARA Method describes the value of both sprints and marathons in differentiating projects from areas:

“Think of projects as sprints—you are sprinting to reach the finish line as fast as possible. Areas are like marathons—you have to sustain a consistent level of performance over a long distance."

Projects bring novelty and excitement. At the same time, areas bring you peace of mind - a sense of perspective, whether you succeed at that thing or not. While projects and areas are related, distinguishing between them is critical. Failing to do so is the root cause of frustration. For example, if you treat a project, such as writing a book, like an ongoing area, with no end goal, it will feel aimless. Likewise, if you treat an area like a project, you fail to establish this as a habit for the long term.

Just in Time Organising

Forte describes that there will sometimes be projects that come from areas, or resources that evolve into areas of responsibility. But unlike some of his organising counterparts, he promotes keeping the system as easy and simple as possible. There is no need for a complex hierarchy of folders within each folder:

“The greatest breakthroughs often come from unexpected connections between ideas, and if your system is too rigidly formal, you’ll prevent such connections from ever forming. Allowing some messiness and randomness into the system creates opportunities for very different ideas to be connected and intermixed.”

He suggests scheduling just five minutes a week to maintain your system. This is made possible by keeping an ‘Inbox’ folder where items are held for the week before they are placed in the appropriate folders. Noting that the same folder system can be mirrored across all your digital spaces. Though any of the PARA folders need only exist, there is something to put into it.

Organising Just in Time is part of the core habits of organising that Forte recommends - organising as little as possible as late as possible. It’s the minimalistic approach to organising.

Overall, the system creates a space to “protect your ideas until they have time to bloom”:

“When a new idea is first forming, it is highly vulnerable. Like an infant, it has a lot of potential but needs to be protected from all kinds of risks and threats—the threat of self-doubt, the risk of being criticized by others, and your own fear that it isn’t good enough.”

Favourite Quote

“Using PARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go. It is about organizing information in such a way that it supports and calls into being the future life you want to lead."

The PARA Method by Tiago Forte:  Available on Amazon.