What is PARA?

PARA is a method developed by Tiago Forte to help you organise digital information (tasks, ideas, resources) in a directed way.

PARA stands for:

• Project: Short term activities with an end date (work or life) that you are working on now
• Area: Long term responsibilities (have no end date)
• Resource: Topics that may be useful in the future (saved links, files etc)
• Archive: Inactive items from the above

The premise of this organisational method is to organise items into actionable categories. For example, if you have a project called “Create new email marketing flow” everything that has to do with this goes into that project. This is in contrast to arranging items by their broad categories - for example putting some inspiration for your new marketing flow into a generic folder called Marketing (alongside lots of other non related things). Generic categories make the information less actionable - leading to wasted time trying to organise the information in realtime when you need it.

Projects vs Areas

Projects are short term. Areas are never ending. This is an important distinction, for example Research and development is an Area as it is an ongoing pursuit. A particular piece of work in this area (such as develop prototype X) is a project as this is something that you can cross off your list when it is done.

Getting clarity

Areas represent ongoing goals, and putting them in a different section allows you the clear distinction between what needs doing now (projects) and what can be done later. It makes it clear what your current goals are and how you can link what you are doing now to one of those goals - maintaining momentum as you head towards its completion.