Let’s start at the beginning. Why are we fighting in the first place? Why is organizing notes so hard?
That’s a good question to ask.
One obvious answer is that organizing information is just hard. But it turns out that it’s only really hard for certain types of information.
One way to think about knowledge management is as philosophy in action:
As we think about the best folder structures and tag hierarchies, we’re really doing philosophy. And it turns out that there’s a two-thousand-year-old debate in philosophy that’s pretty similar to the debate between Tiago and Conor.
Instead of being about how notes are organized, it’s about the way the world is organized.
all software does the same thing.
Software lets us record information, store it, transform it, and then retrieve it at an appropriate point in the future.
That’s what every piece of software does. Some pieces of software we call spreadsheets, some software we call CRMs, some we call Facebook, some we call Mario Kart. But they’re all fundamentally the same thing.
They’re just ways to record, store, transform, and manipulate information.
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If you want to be able to organize notes, you need to do one of two things:
Make the use of the notes more predictable and part of a well-defined process
Create an infinitely flexible organizational system
Tiago picked the first move. Conor picked the second. Each choice has its pros and cons.
Tiago’s Process
Tiago’s approach is to create a well-defined process that applies to a segment of knowledge workers, and then use existing organization systems to help him represent and run that process.
The core insight of PARA is two-fold:
The job of every knowledge worker is to produce work
Given (1) all notes can be organized according to how likely they are to be used in the work you are producing
Put simply, Tiago’s organization process is about actionability. Once you’ve centered your organizational process around actionability, categories start to emerge:
Notice how Tiago can create a well-defined process for where a note should be by introducing the actionability constraint. Once we know what notes are for — to take action on a piece of work — we can create a system around it. Categories like “Projects”, and “Archives” then begin to emerge organically.
Tiago has taken the network of information that makes up our notes, and reduced it to a hierarchy in order to make it more usable.
If you need more evidence that PARA is pragmatic, you should take a close look at how Tiago talks about it. He’s specifically designed it to be flexible enough for practitioners to pick and choose which parts of the system are worth doing and which ones aren’t. Do you not find Areas useful in your organization system? Throw it away!
PARA is exactly what most knowledge workers need. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it does work for a lot of people. And that’s really all Tiago wants to do — he doesn’t need to define the one true and correct system of organization for all time. He just needs one that’s good enough to help his students get organized and get back to doing their work.
And that’s exactly what he’s done.