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I'm an organizational mess.
I juggle 30 things at the same time and walk into the day relying on my memory to prioritize my day, week, and month. When I share my screen via zoom, everyone goes "OHHH!" as they see my desktop filled with screenshots alongside a browser packed full of tabs.
I have workdays where I feel like I get nothing accomplished. Even though I had a list of 100 things I need to get done.
The first step is admitting there is a problem, and I have one.
With most problems, I tend to overdo it on the research, reading, and plan of attack. I subscribed to the Everything Newsletter which had both Dan Shipper & Tiago Forte, two well-known organizational nerds who have shared and created many ideas and frameworks to organize your day-to-day.
Through trial and error, I found a comfortable beginning to solving this problem.
I've inherited the P.A.R.A method from Tiago Forte. It's quite simple.
"P.A.R.A. stands for Projects — Areas — Resources — Archives, the four top-level categories that encompass every type of information you might encounter in your work and life." - Tiago Forte
Here a few of his visuals describing each section:
One of the key points Forte reinforces is that you need to approach this system across platforms. I initially made this mistake by exclusively using this system in Notion, and everything else around me was not organized in the same way.
Last week, I started to work this way between Notion & Slack. I've already noticed a significant change. The only difference is that I added "Core Team" into Slack that lists the main people I DM daily. In addition, the "Weekly" tab is a weekly review I am attempting that summarizes the highlights and lowlights from the workweek.
In Slack:
Areas are team channels that I'm a part of
Projects are simply the project channels that are currently 'active'
Resources are channels providing feedback from customers, sales, and channels that provide me the resources I need to do my job.
Archive is a list of channels that are finished projects, but I may want to quickly dive into them to grab some historical context.
In Notion:
Areas move past work and include my writing and reading. Examples of areas are people management, strategy, experimentation, reading, and nuffshoptalk.
Projects are lined up to the projects in Slack with a few personal projects like this article I am writing or a book I want to finish by a certain date.
Resources is stacked with highlights from books I've read from Readwise
Archive is all of the projects that are 'done'
So far, this has helped me compartmentalize all of the ongoing work I have. I still haven't got to a place where my desktop is cleaned up and I organize my files into the P.A.R.A system, but I’m slowly getting there.
When I first attempted this system, I added tasks associated with projects and listed goals that were attached to projects and areas of responsibility. Ultimately, it became too much and I stopped using the system altogether. As a result, I've significantly stripped down the process to have a low effort starting point.
P.A.R.A is one of many ways to stay organized. If you are having a hard time right now organizing your day-to-day, I recommend giving this a try! I’d love to hear other thoughts and suggestions on how to stay organized.