How you can quickly retrieve solution so you can improve productivity
Introduction to PARA framework to organize all new knowledge in a second brain!
Hello to all friends, colleagues, and all the weekend developers!
Have you wondered with all the information that you consume online, how can you store it in a place so that you can access it in the blink of a second?
What if you have a summary at hand of all the articles so that you can do a quick reference and speak as if you knew it all the time?
What if you can keep a record of all the projects you complete so that you can reference them in your LinkedIn profile or even update your resume at a moment’s notice?
Tiago Forte talks about his PARA framework that he developed and wrote about it in the book - Build A Seconds Brain will help you with organizing the information you gather in a reachable format so that you can access it at any point in your life.
If you are a video person, you can watch this here → How you can quickly retrieve solution so you can improve productivity?
What is the PARA framework?
The PARA Framework, created by Tiago Forte, stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
I personally call them the 4 buckets where I store my information.
It is a holistic approach to organizing digital information that empowers individuals to handle the ever-growing influx of data in a structured and effective manner.
The principal concept behind the PARA framework is to organize the information based on how soon you are going to act on the information.
Project Bucket
Projects refer to any task or goal with a clear end result.
It could be to run at the next marathon happening in your city.
It could also mean doing a cloud certification by a certain date.
So when you read an article or video about tips for running a marathon, you will put that piece of information in the Project bucket as that is an existing goal.
Areas Bucket
The areas bucket is the area to which you have a specific role or responsibility.
One of the areas for a developer would be to learn solution design.
It is something that cannot have a definite goal as you have to work on it for years to get better at it.
So when you find an interesting article on solution design or a cheat sheet, you know you will file it under Solution Design within the Areas bucket.
Resources Bucket
The resources bucket is the bucket where you put an article, image, or video that you found interesting but you can’t find useful enough to put in either of the projects or areas buckets.
The information related to your hobbies, and passions can live here.
It could have a wide range of content such as cooking recipes, hiking tips, or restaurants list.
In technology, it could be an area of technology that you want to explore. e.g. It could be data science if you are a developer.
Archive Bucket
All the completed projects go here. This provides you with a reference that you can use for future use.
You can also use this to put your no-longer-interested projects here.
You might have started a project but now for some reason, you do not wish to pursue further as there is something more interesting that has caught your eye.
You can dump it in Archive. That way, you can resume the project again in the future if you want.
What this also gives is that it will give you freedom from the burden of completing a project on which you have been procrastinating.
Dynamic System
The beauty of this framework is that this is a dynamic system.
The piece of information does not have to live in the bucket where it was first assigned.
Consider, you were interested in hiking and you stored the list of great hikes around your place in the Resources bucket.
3 months down the line, you and your friends want to go on a hike. You create a new project Hiking.
Now you search for past notes and you find this list in Resources. You move this piece of information into the new Hiking project. This will help you organize the hike with your friends along with other brainstorming and ideas.
Once you go out with your friends on the hike, you move this Hiking project to the Archive bucket.
1 year later, you again want to go for a hike. You create a new Hiking project and pull the information for hiking trails from the Archive bucket.
Notice the lifecycle of the article on hiking trails went through.
It went from Resources → Projects → Archive → Project.
Tools
There are multiple tools that are available to implement this system. You can use Evernote, Notion, or Roam Research. then, there are alternatives such as LogSeq and Obsidian.
The advantage of these tools is they are available on all browsers, desktop apps, and mobile apps.
What this does is, you will have information on you all the time on any device.
Conclusion
I have been using it for the past month or so and it has looked promising. I use Notion to organize.
Give this framework a go. Let me know how you go.
Weekend Reads
Serverless and event-driven design thinking - An introduction article to serverless and event-driven design
The Design of a Distributed Rule Engine Framework - A definite read to scale rule engine across systems
Podman Equivalent for Docker Compose - Podman - A docker alternative. First learned about Podman this week at work.