I began applying P.A.R.A., in Evernote in June 2020 and migrated to Obsidian in October. One issue I found was separating information between Areas and Resources. After spending a week at the Build A Second Brain Summit, I recognized (my fault that tool so long) that Areas and Resources are logical rather than physical constructs. In addition, expanding the ‘life coverage’ to be the driver for the Projects provides a Life Operating System (re: August Bradley/PPV). Additionally, the idea of Personal Knowledge Management started to percolate. This led me to believe that there is a dissonance between the (P)KM and Productivity crowds based on the goals and deliverables of the two groups. This leads to different “focused offerings” based on founder interest, business models and potential customers.
Some of the methods primarily address tactical execution (Franklin, Covey, GTD, PARA), some address KM (zettelkasten, LyT) and lastly the more expansive scope of the Life Operating Systems (PPV).
These digital methods address storing and finding information using a combination of organization techniques (folders in the ‘physical’ or buckets in the DB ), and links and tags in both. They all apply processes to organize the stored information. So fundamentally, while these methods address the same information, they have slightly different perspectives.
Admittedly, I haven’t been through all (maybe even much) of the documentation for the newer methods, but here’s my take away so far.
There are four broad areas that are at least somewhat addressed from the beginning (think Daytimer, Franklin, Covey) but brought to the fore with PKM and Life OS (in a historical order):
- task management/productivity
- information capture/retrieval
- knowledge consolidation/discovery
- life vision (actually first if we think Benjamin Franklin’s Journal)
