Use the PARA Method to Organize Your Digital World

Here's an easy way to organize your digital information.

You need all of your digital information well-organized on your devices, but that's easier said than done. Productivity guru Tiago Forte recognized that and came up with the PARA system, a simple technique to keep everything related to your work and interests in order digitally.

What is PARA?

PARA is an acronym that stands for Project, Area, Resource, and Archive. The goal of using it to categorize your digital information is similar to using the Organizational Triangle to organize your physical stuff: You need to know where every document, file, presentation, note, picture, and outline is when you need it, so you can more easily find it.

Projects refer to anything short-term you're working on at the moment (like finishing a report or buying a new couch), while Areas are more broad, long-term pursuits you need to work on over time (like your overall health or your career progress). Resources are any pieces of information that might be useful in the future, and the Archive is for inactive files from the other three categories.

How to use PARA

You can implement this system in your computer's files or a cloud-based service like Google Docs or Dropbox. Each of the four categories should be a top-level folder. Anything related to a current project goes in projects, anything related to your broader responsibilities is in areas, anything that might be useful to one of those in the future goes in resources, and anything you've completed or stopped working on gets moved into archives.

From there, make sub-folders within the original four. Under projects, for instance, you might have a folder for the report you're working on, but also your quest to learn some French before your trip to Paris, your current home renovation project, or the deal you're finalizing at your job. Areas can be your general job functions, your health, or your finances—those things you're always toiling away on and adding to. Under resources, you can save anything that might be useful to those projects or even just related to your interests, like productivity guides or templates or information on a hobby that sounds interesting but you don't have time for right now.

Using four distinct categories prevents you from making up too many—when that happens, any one file could also easily be stored in a variety of folders, making it harder to find something specific.

Set a reminder in your phone or calendar to go through your folders on the first day of each month, moving finished projects over to the archive or pulling resources out to match up with any current pursuits they're finally applicable to.