Skip to content

Comment on The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Informationparent

Comments

I hadn't heard of it, but it's straightforward enough. Johnny decimal seems to work best for communication between multiple people, it's like a lightweight way of having human-implementable URLs.

The thing with PARA is that information falls into different buckets according to their use, not their topic. You're in a completely different mindset when you're looking up old stuff for reference (archives), remembering that bash command you use once a month (resources), etc.

On a first impression / hunch, your decimal system seems to have the failure mode that your old finances live right next to your current finances. Thus, the size of your context / working window just grows and grows without bounds, becoming unwieldy over time. With PARA, the idea is that a project folder contains data if and only if you need it to work on that project.

A very low-cost way of trying it out is to just implement the 2nd A (archives). That's by far the most important.

Thank you for your valuable insight, I will start with that and see if I can implement any of the other groupings with minimal damage.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.