The PARA method for note taking never seemed to work for me. I originally liked the Archive section, as I had a lot of notes that I deemed old and no-longer relevant. The Projects section also originally worked for me. But the Areas and Resources section never seemed disparate enough, so I merged the 2 categories from the offset.
Over time, I found that I was accessing the notes in the Archive section more often than I originally thought I would, so are they really "Archived"? I also found that there was a lot of links between my Projects section and the notes held in the Areas/Resources section, so it didn't make a lot of sense for me to artificially separate the 2 sets of notes.
In the end, I abandoned the structure and just went for a series of low-hierarchy folders where the top level folder is a high level group (E.G. "Tech", "Finances", "Daily Notes") then the folder beneath that is a grouping if Topics (E.G. "Cloud", "Mortgage", "January") and then finally the individual files are in there. The low-hierarchy means that I shouldn't get too lost, and hopefully the topics are wide enough to encompass everything.
Links
- Better Note taking
- Note apps are where ideas go to die. And that's good
- Note capturing system
- Markdown alternatives
- Why/How to use plaintext (Markdown) for notes
- Using markdown for presentation slides
- Awesome Markdown software
- On physical note taking and notebooks 📔
- An excellent introduction to GTD
- Why write a journal?
- 6 years of journaling