[Second Brain 2] Organizing with PARA

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the second of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end. The first session was last week.

Recommended reads

• PARA: https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/ 
• Blogpost Annealing: https://www.swyx.io/blogpost-annealing/
• Twitter as Universal Meta-Commentary Layer: https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary/
• Digital Garden TOS: https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos/
• Devon Zuegel on Epistemic Status: https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing

Slides and Video.

Timestamps

• Prelude [00:00:00]
• Housekeeping [00:01:09]
• Content Recap [00:02:34] 
• Q&A: Constancy/Consistency [00:11:17] 
• Q&A: Maintaining the Second Brain [00:14:34]
• Q&A: Weaknesses of PARA [00:17:55]
• Q&A: Broken Links in Notion [00:19:16] 
• Q&A: Automation with Zapier [00:22:34]
• SMART Goals [00:23:25]
• Denormalizing Notes [00:25:01]
• Open Source Knowledge [00:28:27]
• Brag Documents [00:29:28]
• Just Do It [00:30:57]
• Q&A: How do you share in public? [00:31:45]
• Q&A: Atomicity/Denormalization [00:34:02]
• Q&A: Why Notion? [00:37:33]
• Q&A: Book writing? [00:38:28]
• First Wrapup [00:40:23] 
• Q&A: Twitter Links Extension [00:42:30]
• Q&A: Chrome Extensions [00:43:33]
• Q&A: How do you balance research and writing? [00:44:39]
• Q&A: Converting Resources to Projects [00:47:37]
• Q&A: Video/Audio Capture [00:49:11]
• Q&A: Speaking [00:50:39]
• Q&A: Writing My Book [00:52:58]

Transcript

Prelude [00:00:00]

swyx: [00:00:00] Why PARA? Have you considered why only four letters? I really liked the thought process going into that.  That's actually touched upon in the blog post. I'm not sure that you covered it in the lectures, but I think it's just really great to have something that's barely minimal enough that it covers the span of everything that we organize our information because I think in past attempts, I know I have probably, this is a common experience, you try to organize all the things and then you have like 15 different categories to spot stuff in and you just get overwhelmed because  you're like, I don't know where to put stuff in. So the second week, week two is really about organization. So that's what we're trying to optimize for.

And that's what PARA is. Christopher says some of the mentors have modified the acronym shock. What, what modifications have they said?  Some mentors only have PAR or PA. Yeah.  I will say my A and my R are merged, Maria says PTARA for tasks with silent T that's. Cool. 

Yeah, because you do need tasks as well.  So I'll mention something about your calendar as a to-do list, because that's pretty important. Someone should blog about that because then you scoop Tiago. Alright. 

Okay. So I'm going to get started and I'm going to try to keep the chat alive. 

Housekeeping [00:01:09]

This is a little bit stressful as always, cause I'm not used to such a big zoom but thanks for everyone for making the time on the weekend. This is the notion advanced group that I lead. It's Sundays at 5:00 PM, as you might know. And it's a very developer focused the meet up because there are a lot of developers in BASB, but we do try to keep it generally accessible. Part and just I'm going to give an agenda that's happening cause last time it didn't. So you know what to expect and you can jump off  if you have other stuff going on. 

So we're going to do a little bit of content recap. I got very positive feedback from last week about what did we cover this week? From my point of view, and then we'll talk a little bit about projects versus areas. I'll give some extra content around what I think para is. I don't have, I didn't modify the acronym. That's a very smart move. I wasn't smart enough to think about that. And then we'll just have a general Q&A . 

Last time we went for 90 minutes, this one, we try to keep it to an hour, but.

Some housekeeping, the three rules that we have from zero, because we start at zero in this house 

stupid questions are welcome 

Second rule Often beats perfect. So don't try to do it right, but I try to do the best, just do it a lot and you'll find that you do more than if you try to do the best 

and third rule this is a discussion, not a lecture, so I'm not an expert and I don't have the right answer. And I fully welcome people here to answer questions that other people have asked, because I don't know the right answer as well. So it's a discussion that I'm  facilitating. So that's the framing that I want to set for this session. 

Content Recap [00:02:34] Okay. So now into the content recap I'm just basically going to pick the three best slides that I thought really represented this week. So if you remember nothing else from this week, hopefully you remember these slides.

So the primary thing I think that everyone needs to get from this week is that completed creative projects by the oxygen of your second brain. In other words, action. Right. Or what did someone say at the start of the session, christopher said, para is a methodology to organize the action ability, basically like optimize for taking action, nothing else matters.

And your system needs to help you get there. And your second brain has helped me get there. I 

like the metaphor of oxygen because without oxygen, your second brain is going to starve. And I definitely find that very true of myself. We all have stuff, we haven't competed. And then we just reinforced this identity of a person who does not complete projects. So the smaller your ambitions the more you can feed them the more you have reinforces image of someone who completes projects and you get more done. 

This is PARA in one slide, very ambitious. I basically wanted to summarize, what the main aspects of PARAwe should have for those who might've missed it. I did share the slide deck, so you don't have to screenshot or anything. So I'm going to share that in the chat right now. Well, it's actually P stands for projects, A stands for Area, R stands for resource and archive is basically inactive  items from all three categories. 

And one of the key insights is that it's arranged in order for more actionable to less actionable.

And the other order that you see as well is that there are less projects in there. There should be the most number of archives. So I think if you saw Tiago live session, he showed you his own Evernote where he actually showed like the number of projects was like 5% of the total number of notes that he was taking and yet hundreds of archives.

And that's w...