Guide to PARA in Craft landscape

I love Craft.

I think I can consider myself an active Craft user.

Over time I have organized a system, that I think can serve well not only for me, but also for anyone who is looking to stick to a minimal amount of tools in use, but still keep some meaningful structure without overdoing it.

Ideas — Projects — Areas — Containers — Resources — Archive

You might think “Oh, I know, it’s a well-known PARA Method, why bother reading about it a million times…”

Wait a sec.

First of all, while PARA has indeed inspired me to thoughtfully approach my information and data in the first place, my actual setup in Craft is quite a different thing.

Orthodox PARA does not work for me "as is". I realized it has to be tuned, no matter which tool I would use.

Second of all, Craft is a very special Creature that has its own way of doing things and limitations.

My framework here in this article is tailored specifically (and thoughtfully) to 2 things:

1. To Me
2. To Craft

Hence, take a look, maybe it might be something useful to you as well.

Projects

A Project is something active, outcome- and result-oriented, that has an end date or Deadline and a very well-defined Area. While it may operate with all kinds of information, require certain Resources, knowledge and ongoing organization, it will inevitably end up in the Archives.

• Projects are described by various types of information
• Have various goals, solve particular problems
• Belong to Areas
• Have actionable items in them
• Have deadlines or due dates
• Have outcomes. Outcomes become Resources (not necessarily in Craft btw)
• Are archived once completed

Example of the project in Craft:

Areas

The Area is something big, yet very personal. They contain Projects, can relate to Resources, but hardly ever can be Archived.

• Areas are ongoing, i.e. unlimited in time
• Are personal — the meaning can be defined by you and can be different from what others may understand
• Can contain some one-time or recurring activities or actions.
• Can serve for one both as Containers AND sources of content and actions, like Projects
• Examples – “Company”, “Reflection”, “Travel”, “Family”

Areas can “contain” or relate to other categories.

Projects: an Area can have Projects that belong to it. Examples:

• Work Projects — to Work Area
• House Renovation — to Family Area
• Travel Planning Project — to Travel Area

Resources — an Area can have its own set of Resources (Finance books, Software instructions)

Archives — an Area can have its own archive (for instance, old travel bookings, Old finance docs, etc).

Containers

The closest analog to a Container is Tag. But I’d say Container is something a bit more functional in Craft, because of the way the back-linking works. Containers can very well serve for incoming links — i.e other parts of your knowledge base can link to a Container, but the Container itself cannot be a source of information or link to anywhere else. Also, no project can start from a Container, i.e. you cannot have a Project in a Deadline container, or Resources for Todo or Instruction.

So, key outtakes about Containers:

• They work like tags
• Can be linked to
• Cannot be source of projects, actions or points of interests
• Well-known simple 1-word entities
• Require zero explanation
• Do not depend on individual perception
• Examples: “Legal”, “Todo”, “Deadline”, “People”, “Health”, “Documents”, “Instruction”

There are some interesting ways I’ve found I can use Containers for. For example, to list all the Deadlines:

And Multi-level Containers can work for cases like finding blocks linking to particular person (e.g. John):

People Uber-Container. If you work in the organization, will be especially useful.

Links to all the pages where John is mentioned

Resources

Resources are the most static entity in my setup, aimed to reflect the reference information. Might be useful anywhere, from Projects to some random day-to-day occasions. Generally they are something that “assists”, or enables you to do something.

Resources overview

• Represented by Folders
• Can have subfolders, based on Areas, or any other categories meaningful to you
• Static, non-actionable information
• Can be used in Projects as sources of additional information and content
• Can be archived

Archive

This is a storage for an outdated content, which can potentially be needed in the future. IMHO the real difference between Archives and Resources resides only in the fact that Resources are helpful right in the present, they are undoubtedly useful now. While Archives are something you are not really using in this particular moment.

Archive. Completed Projects pinned to Top.

• Represented by Folders
• Can have subfolders, based on Areas
• Needs revision, once a month or once per quarter to remove the content that is not needed anymore

Daily Notes

And surely one of the greatest things about Craft is Daily Notes.

I have a separate article about them, where you will learn how to organize something similar in Apple Notes (quite interesting, honestly), but let's see how they work in particular routine.

Daily Note

Daily Notes serve as a canvas, for all the ideas that come to my mind throughout the day, meeting notes, sketches, copy-pasted images, screenshots, and so on. Craft's interpretation of Daily Notes also includes the links that lead to particular day, which comes quite handy.

My Todo Container plays a big role in my workflow, but I understand this is just a workaround for Craft's inability to pay a proper respect to tasks :) Sorry to say, NotePlan and even Evernote nail task tracking down in a significantly more convenient way.

Routine

But all of the above does not work without a certain routine around it.

What I do in the Morning:

1. Open up my Calendar, see the busy areas and Free spots
2. Open up Daily Note in Craft and see what notes are linked to Today’s date.
3. Sometimes I list several things I’d like to accomplish today (without looking back at my actual Todo list)
4. Then I open up ToDo Container to get an overview of what’s going on, list tasks I’d like to focus on in the Tasks section of my Daily Note

What I do in the Daytime:

1. If there is a Meeting, I put meeting notes in the Daily Note to be able to send them afterward. Craft has built-in functionality to link such to events.
2. If I take a screenshot, I put it in the Daily Note
3. If there is a big chunk of copy-paste text, I paste it to the Daily Note (as a standalone sub-page most probably)
4. If there is an interesting weblink, I put it in the Daily Note
5. If I have a thought or an idea, I put it in the Daily Note

You got the idea. I usually keep the Daily Note window separately on the side of the screen to have it at hands.

What I do in the Evening:

1. Open up Daily Note and scroll bottom up to sort out all the sh*t I cluttered Craft’s servers with
2. First of all, if it is something I will never need, I remove it instantly.
3. If I have an idea that worth continuation, I put it in the Ideas folder or just put in the Unsorted folder in Craft. This place is something I then review from time to time.
4. If the information is actionable, I link a ToDo Container to it and move to the corresponding Project or Area. This is where you may want to use you Todo tool of choice instead. For example, Craft can send stuff to Things with backlinking.
5. If it is a simple followup, I just move it to the appropriate date (i.e. Daily Note for the relevant day). That is enough in most of the cases.
6. Meetings Notes is something that I can either leave as is on a date, just add a Meeting Notes Container to them or I move them to a special Meeting Notes Archive but that requires a bit more work. The link to the initial event is unaffected by this change, so I can anyway find them later just by using built-in calendar.
7. If there are completed Projects, I move them to Archive.

Separate note on Completed Projects

If a completed Project ends up with outcomes that will be useful as Resources, I create new Resources page linked to the initial Project, and move project’s outcome there.

Link to Resource from the body of the Project page

The newly created Resource will backlink to its origins, which is neat.

Link to Project from the Resource

Making Sense of Links to Pages

As you can see, Folder-wise, I try to keep the structure as flat as possible. Not only it eases the navigation, but also handles one of the peculiarities of Craft — specifically the way it works with links.

If you put the link from the top-level page that resides directly in the Folder, the destination of this link will show just the document name:

You see "Getting Started" article resides right in the Resources folder?

This is how it will look if you link it to the "Instruction" container

But what happens when you put the source page as a subpage of some higher level page, like I did with the Completed Projects:

"Completed Projects" is a Page inside the Archive folder. And every completed project in it - is a subpage.

You see? If you go to Hobbies, the title of the top-level page (Completed Projects) becomes a really helpful way to show where the link is coming from exactly.

So linking pages directly from Folders (at least currently) will not give as much clarity as linking from the Page level will. Which is quite an important part to me in my way of doing things in Craft.

Summary

So, if you’re like me fell in love with Craft for it’s beauty and versatility — I hope you find this article useful.

The way we can configure the system, by using some logical structures, combined with simple routine, in my view, can get Craft very close to a one-stop shop to manage one’s digital life.

Combine that with Craft’s ability to share the information online, export it to different formats, markdown support, and collaboration capabilities — and you get the ultimate tool that can serve as a central point in multiple workflows.