Today we're going to take a short look on The PARA Method by Tiago Forte. To be honest, I haven't found much of Tiago's work all that useful when it comes to what I view as a Zettelkasten system, and that's because he's not writing about managing your knowledge from a Zettelkasten bent. He's revamping and taking his own look at productivity methods in both Building a Second Brain (BASB) and The Para Method.

Back when I looked at BASB, my biggest fault was that it gave you permission to fall into Collector's Fallacy1 as Forte says2 that if you hit writers block you need to do more research so that you have the raw material needed to write. I don't believe that writers block really exists, I think that hard work is hard and people avoid hard work so writers block became an excuse to do something else instead of the hard work of writing3.

In The PARA Method, Forte fixes this issue and changes his tune on collecting. BASB told you to collect what felt "inspiring"4 while PARA tells you only to collect what is useful to the projects you have going on5. The PARA Method specifically tells you not to collect stuff that's "interesting" because you'll just collect a bunch of useless stuff.

I think when you look at Forte's change from grabbing inspiring content, to only what is useful, you're seeing him admit that he's not about Zettelkasten style knowledge management, he's all about managing your documents so you can get work done. It's about a rebranded personal spin on ideas from Getting Things Done.

So ultimately I stand by my first opinion of Forte's work, it's a productivity system for your task management and the information that goes along with tasks, not a knowledge development system akin to Zettelkasten.

If you're looking for resources to help enhance creativity and to process the content/notes that are generated then How to Take Smart Notes is still the best resource I've found in book form. I'd recommend skipping The PARA Method unless you're looking for basic productivity advice.