This article is a guide for getting started with PARA, an organizational system for your digital life.

Here’s the 5-step process I recommend you follow:

This is the “line in the sand” moment. Instead of trying to “migrate” hundreds of old files into a new system, like a hoarder moving all their stuff into a brand new house, wipe the slate clean and begin anew.

You aren’t actually losing all your existing files. If you really need something from the past, you are always free to dive into the archive, where you will find everything exactly as you left it. But in the meantime, they are out of sight and out of mind, freeing you to focus on new projects and goals.

In your Documents folder on your computer, you’ll go from what is likely a morass of confusing files cluttering up your workspace, to a centralized Archive:

Now that you have a beautiful blank slate, it’s time to create a little bit of structure to store the new things you’ll be creating and capturing.

The best place to start is to create a single folder (or notebook) for each of your current projects. You can complete the Project List Mindsweep exercise to identify your list of projects. Once you’ve created a folder or notebook for each of the projects you’ve identified, you’ll have a minimal but complete set of containers to store anything you might be working on:

Place all these project folders inside one folder called “Projects,” so that you can find them all in one place:

Move the archive of existing files into a new folder called simply “Archives,” so that you can separate what was saved before today’s date from what is saved in the future:

This leaves you with the two essential PARA folders – Projects and Archives. The former you can use for storing files you’re currently working on, and the latter for archiving away anything you’re done with.

Although you could move all your old files into your newly created Project folders, I don’t recommend it. Since you don’t actually know which of these files will be useful, and for which future projects, it’s best to leave them just where they are. Instead of doing a lot of upfront work to organize them, you can search them out only if and when you need them.

The other two remaining PARA folders – Areas and Resources – can and should come later, once you have something to put in them. New information typically arrives via your projects – the things you are actively working on right now. But once there, you’ll often find that some pieces of information are useful beyond just that one project.

For example, you might find that a workout routine you used to prepare for a marathon (a project) is something you’d like to continue doing. You can create a new folder called “Exercise” and move it there, so you always know where to find it. Put this “Exercise” folder in a new folder called “Areas”:

Or maybe you learn some new project management techniques during a client engagement, but once it’s finished, you decide you’d like that knowledge to remain available for future projects. You could move the note containing this knowledge to a new folder called “project management,” and place it inside a new “Resources” folder:

Optionally, you could then number them from 1 to 4 to keep them in order of actionability:

And now you have a fully functional PARA system!

Your projects provide you with a steady stream of insights and learnings, and then some of that knowledge gets filed away in Areas and Resources for future reference.

The process described above can be performed on any platform where you store valuable knowledge, that you want to be highly actionable for your day to day work.

For example, if you already have digital notes that you’d like to preserve for the future without having to go through and organize all of them, just move them all to an “Archive [date]” notebook as described above:

The same goes for any other place where you store valuable knowledge, such as a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive:

Just remember to use the same titles for your projects and areas across different platforms, for consistency and ease of use:

You are looking for insightful, high-value, ambiguous yet impactful information that you will be able to revisit, connect, and combine together to stimulate future thinking.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself when considering whether to save something:

Common kinds of information that people tend to save include:

My recommendation is to save things in your digital notes app by default, since then it will be searchable and synced across all your devices. But there are a couple situations where it makes more sense to save it elsewhere:

Here are some of the most common methods for savings things to Evernote, and there are equivalents for other popular notes apps:

For more details, read the PARA Operations Manual. It contains more guidelines on how to categorize notes, a description of how to maintain your files, and other frequently asked questions.

Thank you to Ellen Koenig, Scott Krouse, Moritz Bierling, and Clay Nichols for their comments and suggestions on this article.