PARA
PARA comes from Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain. It organises by actionability rather than by subject, in four tiers from tightest to loosest:
| What it is | Example | |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | Something with a defined end | Finish this paper, ship 1.2 |
| Areas | Ongoing responsibilities | Health, managing a team, a research direction |
| Resources | Material that may prove useful | Reading notes, industry references |
| Archives | Anything from the three above that is finished | Last year's projects |
It and Zettelkasten are two philosophies: the slip-box cares about how ideas connect, PARA about where things go and when to forget them. They coexist happily — PARA for containers, backlinks for ideas.
Where the Four Tiers Land
Jotaid has two container tiers and PARA has four, so the mapping turns on one decision: the first two use containers, the last two use tags.
| PARA | In Jotaid | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | A project | Something with an end deserves its own scope: list, canvas and graph all narrow to it |
| Areas | A project, or a theme inside a larger one | Responsibilities are ongoing; a theme is lighter. Promote to a project when the area grows big enough to want its own graph |
| Resources | A theme, or simply the Inbox plus tags | Material earns its place by being findable, not by being filed |
| Archives | An archived tag, not a container | See below |
Why Archiving Uses a Tag
In a file system, archiving means moving something to another folder. Do not do that here — moving notes into an "archive project" makes them vanish from your graph: the project bar is a global scope switch, and the graph and matrix only compute relationships within the current project. An archived note may still be a load-bearing piece of evidence for some concept; moving it away severs that thread.
Use a tag instead: mark the batch archived, filter them out of daily views, and leave links, nodes and the graph entirely intact.
The free tier filters by one condition at a time
On the free tier at most one of tags, nodes and theme can be active. An archived tag works there, but cannot be combined with another dimension. Multiple projects need Pro anyway — a full PARA structure is essentially a Pro scenario.
A Workable Starting Setup
- The Inbox is your inbox — PARA's inbox concept already exists here; do not build a second one
- One project per goal in flight (Pro)
- Themes for directions within a project; if an ongoing Area is not large enough for its own project, give it a theme inside a long-running one
- Leave Resources in the Inbox, findable through tags and backlinks, without rushing to file them
- Tag finished things
archivedand leave them where they are
And CODE
Forte's other half — CODE (Capture / Organise / Distil / Express) — maps like this:
| CODE | What you use |
|---|---|
| Capture | Quick Capture: Quick Note, clipping, clipboard import |
| Organise | Projects / themes / tags |
| Distil | ==Highlight==, Smart Format, theme summaries |
| Express | Markdown export, the knowledge graph for finding your evidence |
Next Steps
- Projects and Themes — The two container tiers
- Tags — Archiving and status
- Zettelkasten — The other half: how ideas connect
- Design Thinking — What Jotaid is built around