P.A.R.A Method for Organising Your Notes
Day 27 / 365
A few days ago I wrote about the C.O.D.E method from the book “Building Your Second Brain”, which helps you take your note-making to the next level.
I have just started incorporating this into my daily routine. And as I did that I realized just how vital the “Organisation” step is. You can take as many notes as you want, if you don’t organize them properly, you will never go back to them.
The most common way we think of organizing notes is by grouping them into folders. The book suggests a folder structure that works really well, known as “P.A.R.A”. This stands for “Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive”.
The Project folder will have all the notes related to the stuff that you are working on right now. Ideally, you will create subfolders for each of your projects and add your notes there. This will be the folder that you will be accessing the most.
The Areas folder will have notes that are related to some of your long-term goals and interests. The subfolders here could be things like Finance, Reading, Fitness, Productivity, etc.
The Resources folder will have all the other information that you come across that might be useful sometime in the future but is not relevant to any projects or goals right now.
The Archives folder contains all the notes that are no longer of use to you. The main aim of this folder is to prevent the other 3 folders from getting too crowded. You can safely move old notes to this folder without the fear of losing them. For instance, once you are done with a project, just drag and drop the entire folder into the archives.
Most notetaking apps allow you to create folders and subfolders to achieve this structure. I am currently using Apple notes, since its pre-installed on my iPhone and my MacBook and it works seamlessly.