Part 2 of a 3-part series. Missed part 1? Catch up here: Part 1 here, Part 3: here
Last time I covered CODE — Tiago Forte’s model for what to do with information: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express. I promised the “O” was a whole model of its own. Here it is: PARA.
PARA answers the question every note-taking system eventually faces: where does this go? Most of us organize by topic, like a library. Forte organizes by actionability — how soon and how likely you are to need something. Just four main folders — everything else nests inside them:
Projects — Things with a goal and a deadline. A project ends. If it can’t end, it’s not a project. This folder should be short, current, and reviewed constantly, because it’s where your actual work lives.
Areas — Ongoing responsibilities with a standard to maintain but no finish line: your team, your health, your finances, a role you own. Projects come and go; areas persist.
Resources — Topics you’re interested in and reference material you’re collecting. No commitment attached — it’s the “might be useful someday” shelf, and that’s fine, because it costs nothing sitting there.
Archive — Anything inactive from the other three. Finished projects, areas you no longer own, interests that faded. You don’t delete it — you move it out of sight. If it becomes relevant again, it moves back.
Two things make PARA work for me:
- Notes move. A resource jumps into a project the moment it becomes useful. A completed project drops into the archive. It’s a flow, not a filing cabinet.
- Actionability beats topic. When I open my notes, the question is never “where did I file that?” It’s “what am I working on?” — and everything for that work is already in one place.
And PARA isn’t just for Notion or OneNote or Apple Notes — it’s for your filing system, period. I’ve moved all my folders into the same PARA structure: OneDrive, Google Drive, and any other app that makes me keep folders. Whether I’m in my notes or hunting for a file, everything is organized the same way, because everything falls under those same four categories.
One more thing. This is a business-oriented post, but probably half of what’s in my system is personal. A lot of my areas are family and friends. A project might be a vacation. My resources are recipes and things that feed areas like Cooking or Health. That’s the other beauty of CODE and PARA: I used to run one system for work and another for personal. Now my work and personal priorities, projects, and notes all live in a single place.
Put it all together and here’s the payoff: CODE tells me what to do with information; PARA tells me where it lives and how it’s organized. Nothing I capture is wasted, nothing I need is buried, and when I start something new, the notes and materials for it are already sitting in that project or area, waiting.
I’ve given you the condensed version of both models. If you want to go deeper, just search “Tiago Forte” on YouTube — he has short videos walking through CODE and PARA in more detail.
One installment to go. In part 3 ([LINK TO PART 3]), I talk about connecting AI to your note-taking app — where it truly becomes your second brain. When your AI can read your notes and histories, it automatically knows what you’re working on and gives you better answers, because it has the historical information. I also store my notes from multiple AI platforms in one place: when I’m using Claude, it knows everything my other AI tools have already given me. It’s not just a second brain for me — it’s a second brain for my AI tools, and they learn from each other. It also keeps me portable: whenever a better model comes out or I want to switch, everything is already in my notes, so switching is easy.
Hopefully these 2 cents bring a strong ROI for you.