#7

Well, to get out of the way I wouldn’t call it snake oil in any form, is it completely new and never seen before? No, but is there really anything new? It is indeed an amalgam of various ideas from other places mix together in an interesting form, as it’s how his methods work really. But I have seen and live a significant transformation and increase in my output with it, and I know of many other people who did so to.

The thing with PARA is that’s it’s just 1/3 of BASB really, and a lot of other workflows make it actually works. By itself, it’s just a decent way to keep track of things if you don’t have links or you’re doing project-based organization. As for Areas vs. Resources, it’s a thing that trips everyone really. Those examples are just mine also, for me I don’t want to get better at cooking and improve or keep my focus on it over time, I just put recipe there for reference. In contrast, Health is a thing I’m actually actively looking into and want to get better at and learn more and improve. That’s the only reason why those are there in those categories.

The final thing is moving files across folders. I do that all the time when I’m creating a new project, but that’s not really PARA. It’s more JIT PM, which is another part of BASB enabled by PARA. It’s based on project workflows and moving things and finding interesting ideas as you do so. Can you make it better with linking? Maybe but then if you want to change a piece of information’s place, you have to edit it all the time instead of just dragging it around. It also becomes a lot hard to change stuff unless you have an app like Obsidian that can edit all links on rename.

Speaking of Obsidian, I am working on a mixed version of PARA that includes links and some other things since we can in Obsidian. For this kit, I wanted to explain PARA as it is not how I forked it. However, a lot of people often forked it because BASB and PARA are just the bare minimum working minimum that you build upon, not a final done product.

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#8

I recently (sort of) took Building A Second Brain class, and I started my version of it. I have to say, I love it! I’m a graduate student and I was overwhelmed with the gigantic amount of information I was getting from different sources and in different formats. But it helped me a lot. Though PARA is just part of BASB, I can say that it is easily one of the most important elements of it.
Also for those who are interested, there is a great collection of illustrations by Maggie Appleton describing BASB including P.A.R.A. method and how to migrate to it.

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#9
#10

Very helpful @cotemaxime, thank you.

I actually pointed Obsidian to my existing PARA implementation on my work and personal computer, and they are very similar to the example you provide.

I think that’s the brilliant thing about Obsidian, how it fits itself around your existing folder structure with minimal impact.

Your starter kit is reassuring confirmation and a good template to get others started.

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#11

Hey, your Para kit is very useful. I like the theme also. But I seem not to find it. Can you tell me which one you use?
Thanks

#12

the theme was an early version of Nord if I’m not mistaken it was a while ago before we had the community theme plugins and easy way to see theme :sweat_smile: I probably will redo it with a current theme soon

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#13

Nice. thanks for posting this PARA kit. I’ll check it out.

Tip: I like to name my categories with emoji’s at the beginning. For example instead of “Health” I name it “:hospital:Health” or instead of “Finance”, “:dollar:Finance”. At first I thought this was silly but eventually I realized I liked it much more with the emoji’s because it made it much faster to find the category I’m looking for (I can recognize either the word or the picture).

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#14

yes emojis are super useful for this! I use them for most of my root folders in my own setup, but they can sometimes cause some syncing issues (especially with Dropbox) or other small glitches in previous version, so I didn’t include them here to be safe.

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#15

This +1. Really helps me too esp when I used to have my SB organized on Dropbox Paper (I made a network of individual Papers linked together).

I am starting to move my SB to Obsidian with my vault hosted on Dropbox, so I can sync & edit on my iPhone with 1Writer. Works really well, except that Dropbox encounters sync issues with emojis in the .md note file names (e.g. notice tiny red X icon on bottom left below which indicates that it is not syncing) [edit: I just noticed @cotemaxime already addressed this and faced the same issue].

Not syncing
image

Synced
image

Note: syncing with Google Drive instead does solve this problem, but encounters other sync issues with iOS file system for some reason, making Google Drive unusable for my two-way PC/iPhone note syncing system.

My current “workaround” is to have headers on top of each PARA item/note where I can slot emojis, e.g. Areas>Health note would look like below:

:hospital: Health (this is the note header)

  • Content 1
  • Content 2

Obvious downside is that you still can’t see the emojis in your file navigation panel on the left pane, but I am trying to develop a “Control Centre” note that serves as my PARA-indexed landing page every time I launch Obsidian, where I then have links to all other PARA-related sections and notes, making the file navigation tab redundant for me (basically replicating my Dropbox Paper workflow, with the added advantage of Obsidian automatically updating links, and of course system-agnostic data ownership)

Hope that all made sense! Happy to share more once I have a setup and workflow that works well for me if any interest. First post btw, and loving Obsidian + community so far.

1 Like
#16

This was super helpful, thank you! A couple of questions…

  1. Where do you store references in this system?
  2. What tools would you recommend for setting up an inbox?
#17
  1. I don’t really keep reference in the academic sense where I will citation and such but if I was I would probably use another tool made for that like Zotero and just make the same hierarchy in it. Otherwise most of my content is some PDF which I keep locally or online in articles, video, books so I just keep an URL in my note if I even want to reference back
  2. I will greatly depends on where the content you consume comes from, but you could look into Integromat or Readwise (since now they do mass markdown exports) to help pull content from various sources into your inbox. Since most of my reading is in Feedly I just have Readwise pull the highlights from it and once a week or so I just download the Readwise export into my inbox for processing
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#18

Thank you so much. I am trying out Obsidian (just started 2 days ago) and am wondering what took me so long. (HAHA!) Part of deciding to jump in is the accessibility (and readability) of forum discussions. I’m neither a techie person nor a digital stacks fanatic, so I’ve really appreciated what you and others share for kickstarting in Obsidian.

I was in Cohort 11 of BASB, and prior to BASB, I’ve had my own analog + digital PKM system which has served me well. I feel better in Obsidian, for whatever reason compared to having tried out Notion coupled with my existing Evernote graveyard (haha) as a capture, so let’s see how this evolves.

3 Likes
#19

Hi Ryan,
Did you ever complete your part 2 to this post- would love to read it. Part 1 ended on a real cliff hanger !

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#20

Hah, sorry, no—at least, not yet. I wrote that post before linked thinking apps like Obsidian became a thing. When I started using them a whole bunch of new ideas showed up.

So, I’m still working on it. Just trying to refine it to a point that it’s not something only I can understand/use!

Apologies for the cliffhanger. :grimacing:

5 Likes
#21

Dropbox allows for “first-gen emoji” for example heart and writing hand, but not a book

Dropbox supports using emoji that fall in the Basic Multilingual Plance in file and folder names on the website (although there are some OSes that might not sync the files to your desktop computer due to not playing nice with local filesystems).

Emoji that fall into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane won’t work with the Dropbox underlying filesystem, newer emoji fall into this category and are not expected to sync with Dropbox.

Source:

#22

Now it’s a double cliff-hanger!

#23

I’ve been researching this PARA method for a few days now, and I’m drawn to it, but I’m not quite understanding how to implement the “Areas”. It sounds like an Area is a broad subject that you want to keep up with throughout your life, and projects are linked to areas. So is the idea to have an “Area” folder in Obsidian where each file is its own separate area, like “Fitness”? Then inside of that “Fitness” file, I would make bi-directional links to my projects relating to fitness? Is that it or am I missing something?

I should note that I saw how it was laid out in the PARA Starter Kit, but I think that just leaves me more confused than before haha. It looks like each area is its own subfolder, and inside of that subfolder are just things that would typically belong in Resources.

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#24

Areas seems to trip a lot of people, not just you really. I’m planning to redo another version of the kit with updated information about some aspect. One of the things about Project and Areas is that while project can comes from an Area they’re not linked, because there’s no need. I don’t need for example to have a link between my “Server Setup” project and my “Sysadmin” Area, I know that the project comes from there so there’s no need to on top put Areas in there or put projects in Areas. At the end of the project I can just take the relevant things and put them in the relevant area.

As for the areas themselves, it’s for things that I have a standard to maintain over time and that I’m currently working toward (not nice to have and no interested in, those are resources) AND it’s things I write myself and for my own use. Resources are things other people write and stuff like article, book, reference, etc. There was a couple big changes in how I did PARA that I learn from the last BASB course, Areas and Resources can have the same folders, you can have health in both for example. The difference between the 2 is it personal or is it general.

The example was would you be willing to take that folder AS IS and give it to someone who asked what you know about a subject, stuff you wouldn’t be comfortable giving to people because it’s too personal or complicated because it was written for you go into areas.

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#25

Got it now; that makes it very clear. Thank you very much!

#26

I think the best way to distinguish Areas v. Resources is that Areas are notes that are personal to you while Resources are a collection of notes that you could share with someone else who could benefit from your research / collection of notes.

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