Building a Second Brain, page 9
Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold
Finally, we have our archives. This includes any item from the previous three categories that is no longer active. For example:
Projects that are completed or canceled
Areas of responsibility that you are no longer committed to maintaining (such as when a relationship ends or after moving out of your apartment)
Resources that are no longer relevant (hobbies you lose interest in or subjects you no longer care about)
The archives are an important part of PARA because they allow you to place a folder in “cold storage” so that it doesn’t clutter your workspace, while safekeeping it forever just in case you need it. Unlike with your house or garage, there is no penalty for keeping digital stuff forever, as long as it doesn’t distract from your day-to-day focus. If you need access to that information in the future—for example, if you take on a project similar to one you previously completed—you can call it up within seconds.
What PARA Looks Like: A Behind-the-Scenes Snapshot
PARA is a universal system of organization designed to work across your digital world. It doesn’t work in only one place, requiring you to use completely different organizing schemes in each of the dozens of places you keep things. It can and should be used everywhere, such as the documents folder on your computer, your cloud storage drives, and of course, your digital notes app.
Let me show you what it looks like.
Here’s an example of what the folders in my notes app look like with PARA:
Inside each of these top-level folders, I have individual folders for the specific projects, areas, resources, and archives that make up my life. For example, here are the folders for each one of my active projects:
Inside these folders live the actual notes that contain my ideas. The number of active projects usually ranges from five to fifteen for the average person. Notice that the number of notes inside each one (indicated by the number in parentheses after the title) varies greatly, from just two to over two hundred for the book you’re reading right now.
Here are the notes found within a typical project folder for a midsize project, a remodel of our garage into a home studio (which we’ll dive deeper into in subsequent chapters):
The left half of the window displays a list of the twenty-seven notes within this folder. Clicking a note, such as the one shown above containing a collection of photos we used to inspire our own remodel, reveals its contents in the right half of the window.
That’s it—just three levels of hierarchy to encompass the thousands of notes I’ve accumulated over the years: the top-level PARA categories, the project folder, and the notes themselves.
Here is what some of my areas look like:
Each of these folders contains the notes relevant to each of those ongoing areas of my life. Areas related to my business begin with “FL” for Forte Labs, so they appear together in alphabetical order. Here are some of the notes in the “Health” area:
Under resources I have folders for each of the topics I’m interested in. This information isn’t currently actionable, so I don’t want it cluttering up my projects, but it will be ready and waiting if I ever need it.
The archives contain any folder from the previous three categories that is no longer active. I want them completely out of sight and off my mind, but in case I ever need to access research, learnings, or material from the past, it will always be preserved.
PARA can be used across all the different places where you store information, meaning you can use the same categories and the same rules of thumb no matter where you keep content. For example, here is the documents folder on my computer:
And the folders for each one of my active projects:
Inside these folders live the files that I use to execute each project. Here is the project folder dedicated to the book you’re reading right now:
Where Do I Put This?—How to Decide Where to Save Individual Notes
Setting up folders is relatively easy. The harder question that strikes fear into the heart of every organizer is “Where do I put this?”
Apps have made it extremely easy to capture content—it’s just a click or a tap away. However, we are given no guidance for what to do next. Where does a note go once it’s been created? What is the correct location for an incoming file? The more material piles up, the more urgent and stressful this problem becomes.
The temptation when initially capturing notes is to also try to decide where they should go and what they mean. Here’s the problem: the moment you first capture an idea is the worst time to try to decide what it relates to. First, because you’ve just encountered it and haven’t had any time to ponder its ultimate purpose, but more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process. This makes the experience mentally taxing and thus less likely to happen in the first place.
This is why it’s so important to separate capture and organize into two distinct steps: “keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate decision from deciding to save something for the long term. Most notes apps have an “inbox” or “daily notes” section where new notes you’ve captured are saved until you can revisit them and decide where they belong. Think of it as a waiting area where new ideas live until you are ready to digest them into your Second Brain. Separating the capturing and organizing of ideas helps you stay present, notice what resonates, and leave the decision of what to do with them to a separate time (such as a “weekly review,” which I will cover in Chapter 9).
Once you’ve captured a batch of notes and it’s time to organize them, PARA comes into play. The four main categories are ordered by actionability to make the decision of where to put notes as easy as possible:
Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind.
Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable.
Resources may become actionable depending on the situation.
Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.
This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down:
In which project will this be most useful?
If none: In which area will this be most useful?
If none: Which resource does this belong to?
If none: Place in archives.
In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest. By placing a note in a project folder, you ensure you’ll see it next time you work on that project. By placing it in an area folder, you’ll come across it next time you’re thinking about that area of your work or life. By placing it in a resource folder, you’ll notice it only if and when you decide to dive into that topic and do some reading or research. By placing it in archives, you never need to see it again unless you want to.
It can be easy to let our projects and goals fall by the wayside when life gets busy. Personal projects and long-term goals feel especially flexible, like you can always get around to them later. Notes, bookmarks, highlights, and research that we worked hard to find sink deeper and deeper into our file systems, until eventually we forget they even exist.
Organizing by actionability counteracts our tendency to constantly procrastinate and postpone our aspirations to some far-off future. PARA pulls these distant dreams into the here and now, by helping us see that we already have a lot of the information we need to get started. The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not get a PhD in notetaking. Knowledge is best applied through execution, which means whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them.
Organizing Information Like a Kitchen—What Am I Making?
There is a parallel between PARA and how kitchens are organized.
Everything in a kitchen is designed and organized to support an outcome—preparing a meal as efficiently as possible. The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now. Each kind of food is organized according to how accessible it needs to be for you to make the meals you want to eat.
Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes.
Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize. The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable is not whether it is perfectly organized and neatly labeled, but whether it can have an impact on someone or something that matters to you.
PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying to find the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one. The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with your constantly changing life.
This is a challenging idea for a lot of people to wrap their head around. We are used to organizational systems that are static and fixed. We expect to find a strict set of rules that tells us exactly where each item goes, like the precise call numbers for books in a library.
When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. Because our priorities can change at a moment’s notice, we have to minimize the time we spend filing, labeling, tagging, and maintaining our digital notes. We can’t run the risk of all that effort going to waste.
Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories. You might save a note on coaching techniques to a project folder called “Coaching class,” for a class you’re taking. Later, when you become a manager at work and need to coach your direct reports, you might move that note to an area folder called “Direct reports.” At some point you might leave that company, but still remain interested in coaching, and move the note to resources. One day you might lose interest in the subject altogether and move it to the archives. In the future, that note could find its way all the way back to projects when you decide to start a side gig as a business coach, making that knowledge actionable once again.
The purpose of a single note or group of notes can and does change over time as your needs and goals change. Every life moves through seasons, and your digital notes should move along with them, churning and surfacing new tidbits of insight from the deep waters of your experience.
Completed Projects Are the Oxygen of Your Second Brain
Your efforts to capture content for future use will be tremendously easier and more effective if you know what that content is for. 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.
I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Back in college, I worked part-time at an Apple Store in San Diego while I finished my studies. At the time it was one of the five busiest Apple Stores in the world, with thousands of people walking through our doors every day. It was there that I got my first taste of teaching people how to use computers more effectively.
I taught morning classes to small groups of people who had just bought their first Mac, and also did one-on-one consultation sessions. This was the golden age of Apple’s iLife suite of creative software: every single Mac computer came preinstalled with user-friendly apps for creating websites, recording music, printing photo books, and making videos. It was like having a complete multimedia studio at your fingertips at no additional cost.
I would sit down with customers and answer any questions they had about the new computer they had just bought. In most cases they had just migrated all their files over from Windows, and years of accumulated documents lay scattered across their desktop and documents folders.
At first I tried guiding them through organizing each document one at a time. It quickly became clear that this didn’t work at all. The one-on-one sessions were only one hour, not nearly enough time to make even a dent in the hundreds or even thousands of files they had. It wasn’t time well spent anyway, because these were often old documents that weren’t relevant to their current goals or interests.
I knew I needed a new approach. I started asking questions and listening, and eventually realized that these people didn’t need or want an organized computer. They had spent all this money and time moving to a Mac because there was something they wanted to create or achieve.
They wanted to make a video for their parents’ anniversary party, a website for their cupcake shop, or a record showcasing their band’s songs. They wanted to research their family genealogy, graduate from college, or land a better job. Everything else was just an obstacle to get past on the way to their goal.
I decided to take a different approach: I took all the files they’d migrated over and moved them all to a new folder titled “Archive” plus the date (for example, “Archive 5-2-21”). There was always a moment of fear and hesitation at first. They didn’t want anything to get lost, but very quickly, as they saw that they would always be able to access anything from the past, I watched them come alive with a renewed sense of hope and possibility.
They had repeatedly postponed their creative ambitions to some far-off, mythical time when somehow everything would be perfectly in order. Once we set that aside and just focused on what they actually wanted to do right now, they suddenly gained a tremendous sense of clarity and motivation.
For a while I was sure this would come back to haunt me. Eventually they’d want to go back and organize all those old files, right? I would often see the same people coming back to our store again and again. I waited expectantly in fear for someone to return and accuse me of losing all their old files.
Let me tell you: no one ever did.
Not once did someone come back and say, “You know, I’d really like to go back and organize all those files from my old computer.” What they did tell me were the stories of the impact their creative projects had: on their families, on their business, on their grades, on their career. One person organized a fundraising drive for a friend who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia. Another put together a successful application for a small business loan to start a dance studio. One student told me that the ability to tame the chaos of her digital world was the only reason she had finished college as the first graduate from her family. The details of how they organized their computer or took notes were trivial, but the impact their creativity had on their own lives and the lives of others—that was anything but.
There are a few lessons I took away from this experience.
The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. That’s why that archiving step is so crucial: you’re not losing anything, and it can all be found via search, but you need to move it all out of sight and out of mind.
Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters. I’d see a fire light up in people’s eyes when they reached the finish line and published that slideshow or exported that video or printed that résumé. The newfound confidence they had in themselves was unmistakable as they walked out of the store knowing they had everything they needed to move forward.
I’ve learned that completed creative projects are the blood flow of your Second Brain. They keep the whole system nourished, fresh, and primed for action. It doesn’t matter how organized, aesthetically pleasing, or impressive your notetaking system is. It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, momentum, and accomplishment. It doesn’t matter how small the victories. Even the tiniest breakthrough can become a stepping-stone to more creative, more interesting futures than you can imagine.
Your Turn: Move Quickly, Touch Lightly
A mentor of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me ever since: move quickly and touch lightly.
She saw that my standard approach to my work was brute force: to stay late at the office, fill every single minute with productivity, and power through mountains of work as if my life depended on it. That wasn’t a path to success; it was a path to burnout. Not only did I exhaust my mental and physical reserves time and again; my frontal assaults weren’t even very effective. I didn’t know how to set my intentions, craft a strategy, and look for sources of leverage that would allow me to accomplish things with minimal effort.
