# Step Two - Understanding the PARA Convention *** **Prev Card**: [[Step One - Setting Up Your Second Brain With Obsidian]] **Next Card**: [[Step Three - Using PARA with Obsidian]] *** ## Overview Once you have an Obsidian Vault Setup with the proper directory structure, you need to understand the **PARA Convention**. By convention, I mean this is how **you will think about your information**. No software will force you to do this. This is a mental approach to thinking about knowledge and it is important. ## How to think about PARA PARA, as you may have guessed stands for: - Projects - Areas - Resources - Archives The system is designed to store information by **Actionability**. ![[PARA Actionability SketchNote.jpeg]] ### About PARA This system was created by [[Tiago Forte]] and written about in his [[library/Building a Second Brain|book Building a Second Brain]]. There is an absolutely beautiful visual note of this book and Forte's ideas on Maggie Appleton's website: [Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes (maggieappleton.com)](https://maggieappleton.com/basb). However, I will try to give you the simplest, most important aspect of this here. > [!note]- What is a Zettelkasten? > A Zettlekasten is a way of building and managing a PKM and it is different from PARA. Tiago Forte get's a lot of notoriety for being one of the first people to **write** about building a second brain, but back in the 60's there was a German Sociologist named Niklas Lumen who created a note keeping system called the Zettelkasten, or slip box. Lumen used his note system to **publish** an unbelievable 600 academic papers and over 40 books solo during his career. This is unheard of. How Lumen kept his notes was written about in the 2017 [[library/How to Take Smart Notes|book How to Take Smart Notes]] by [[Sönke Ahrens]]. My article [[Published/Building a Second Brain|How to Build a Second Brain]] explains how to use zettlekasten principles to create notes. To be a little meta, these articles used Zettlekasten principles... But, back to being useful. PARA is a system for organizing information by **Actionability**. Basically, you sort your information by when and how you plan to act on it. ### Projects Projects are multi step tasks that you plan to complete **soon**. These are the 5-15 things you are **actively working on**. This could be a research assignment, a project for work, or something as mundane as "fix the shower handle" in the master bathroom. Projects represent your nearest term objectives. There is a saying, Projects should align with goals. > A goal without a project is a dream. A project without a goal is a hobby. ### Areas Areas represent the next window of actionability. People confuse areas with projects all the time and this creates all sorts of havoc with to do lists and project management software. Areas in principle, **are very long lived**. For example, managing your finances, or your health, or keeping your house clean. Your Career is an area. Areas, different from Projects often are not goal oriented but Standard oriented. You want to live in a safe, comfortable home. That is a standard. Buying a new home in contrast is a project. You want to be fit and trim. That is a health standard. Areas often have many tasks that repeat at regular intervals (take out the trash), or fit into daily routines (brush your teeth, walk the dog, work out.). Areas are where we store information relevant to these kinds of activities. ### Resources Resources move the time horizon out even further. Resources are where we store what Richard Feynman called, **12 Interesting Questions**. This is where you store information you are curious about but have no immediate plans to act. For me, this includes notes I have taken at Bible Study, notes from books on Buddhism, but also Journal pages, notes on Mental Toughness, NodeJS, Maturity, Masculinity, Psychological Biases, Python, How to Negotiate and so on. ### Archives Finally, we have archives. If we're not working on it now, it does not fit into an area of our life, and we are not interested in it - don't delete it, archive it! Archives are where we store things we are finished with (completed projects, resources that are no longer interesting, or areas that no longer are relevant - say you've changed careers.) For example, when I completed finishing the Master Bath Shower handle Project, I moved the whole folder into the Archives folder. When I stopped Coaching, I moved all my coaching resources into Archives. The important thing about Archives is that **you never lose any information** but you can remove it from your visual clutter. The information is always available. ## Next Step Remember, PARA is a convention, a mental model if you will. It is a way of thinking about information. It is a bit like saying, "I will keep my socks in the top drawer of my dresser". There's nothing about a dresser forcing you put your socks in one place, let alone the top drawer, but once you decide "that's where they belong", by convention, they will (nearly) always go there making them easier to find, and put away. With that in mind, let's take a look at how I use PARA to solve some of my knowledge problems. [[Step Three - Using PARA with Obsidian]]