Beyond PARA: Introducing "The Keep"

Replacing The PARA Content Factory With A Someday-Maybe Empire

This is the fourth episode of Beyond PARA — surpassing the PARA method.

After you adapt what I show you today, you will be no longer using a PARA mod, but a completely novel system. In this system you will no longer be a PK manager operating a content factory. Instead, you will graduate to become a PK builder actively working on and constructing a knowledge empire.

Tiago Forte once compared a second brain to a living and breathing organism where “finished projects” provide the oxygen. I agree with the first part; a second brain is a dynamic system. The second part, however, is wrong — the number of projects you complete is secondary.¹

As a metric, “projects completed” may give you insight into the nature of your work. It may tell you about your usual effort size and reliance on personal project management. However, as a mere number — the fact that you completed some things— won’t yield any useful insights into your true productiveness. For instance, it won’t tell you anything about the quality of your output, whether you could’ve achieved your means differently, or whether you should have done it in the first place.

I like the oxygen metaphor, but regarding second brains, I think it should refer to something entirely different. In this episode, I will introduce you to something that I believe represents PKM oxygen flow way better. I call it The Keep, a new org space that greatly impacts one’s approach to Personal Knowledge Management.

⚠️ BEWARE: You are leaving PARA territory here. Adopting The Keep will transform you from a mere knowledge manager into an active knowledge builder. While knowledge building is an immensly gratifying and powerful way to interact with reality, it isn’t for everyone. It requries a lot of time and a great love for learning and contemplating. So, if you are looking for a mere content factory, stick to PARA or try PARA modding. Otherwise, forge ahead and change your PKM game forever!

Air For Our Personal Knowledge Companion

All organic life is sustained by underlying networks transporting oxygen, resources, and metabolites. Similarly, one could argue that in a second brain, artifacts must be able to easily flow where they need to go. PARA is great at this, continually pushing you to move files around the most actionable. If your main aim is to produce, churning out projects as a method and analogy for oxygen works.

But as we’ve explored throughout this series, this approach is too limiting and suffocates many other valuable endeavors. Nick Milo from Linking Your Thinking also discovered this and created an alternative organizational method to PARA, called ACE. With ACE we embrace many more of the different potential intentions we have when interacting with our second brain, not just effort management. One such intention is note-making, which he defines as intentional sense-making, emphasizing thinking and learning over consumption and creation. Another possible intention we might have is self-reflection and contemplation about our life, for instance, through journaling.

Given all these possible ways of interacting with a second brain, comparing the number of completed projects to the oxygen flow feels like pulling on an oxygen mask. It may keep your system alive but also has stinging opportunity costs.

Instead, I think the oxygen for your second brain should be seen as all your interactions with it, not just your concluded efforts. This includes artifact retrieval, browsing, sense-making, linking, upkeep, tuning, and all the other wonderful ways you manage your knowledge within your second brain.

When I say “second brain,” I usually refer to your overall PKM system, which comprises various software tools. However, this series mostly concerns our system's main app and core — what I’ve called a personal knowledge companion (PKC); your main notes app or “PKM app”. While brains need oxygen, the “companion” terminology makes the oxygen metaphor even more apt. With this reframe, you suffocate your system if and only if you stop interacting with it altogether. In other words, when you stop interacting with your companion, you start to suffocate it.

With this reframe, we see many ways to improve oxygen flow within a PKC, but churning out more projects isn’t one of them. Instead, the oxygen flow depends on how many potential pathways enable you to traverse your system. Pathways that make it easy to go from A to B and, by doing so, enforce the relationship between A and B.

Choosing a certain organizational structure, such as PARA and ACE can greatly influence how and how fluidly we traverse our system. In this series, we’ve already looked at several potent examples of how to build pathways by altering our organizational structures:

• By thinking in Efforts instead of Projects we gain more leeway in managing our initiatives. All our endeavors remain central regardless of their size, status, or nature, easing up their traversal.

• By detecting, picking, and clustering all things with a compass functionality in a single dedicated space called Protocols we ensured that we could easily find and access these vital guiding artifacts.

• By introducing an, Incubator we eased up traversal during capture and qualification. This simplified our system and cognitive efforts.

Physical folder hierarchies have been the most prominent way to define pathways for the longest time, as they closely resemble how we navigate physical reality. We usually have not stored entire pathways in our gray matter. To go from A→D, we don’t remember the whole path but merely snippets of it. We know that from A, we need to go to B and from B to C. And we use where we currently are as input to know that and make each navigational step. Folder-based navigation most closely resembles this in the digital world.

However, modern tools for thought are on the rise, and with them come a much more powerful way of traversing. Bidirectional linking is much more aligned with how our brains work. So, it allows us to cut out the middle man of translating movement to the physical world and then back to the mental one. Instead, with link-based navigation, we build up a web of pathways. This way, we approach navigation in a more bottom-up fashion. We do countless tiny experiments on how to best hop between nodes and reinforce the most natural paths in the process.

Links are created much faster than folders and are much more flexible, as we can have multiple relationships between nodes. Thus, to create a system with real oxygen flow, we need to eliminate folders. This is the idea of The Keep, or simply Keep. The Keep is many things—an advanced incubator, a fallback place, the heart of our system, and our knowledge base itself…. It is, however, above all else, a different approach to PKM. One that embraces the link over the folder. It can become the true oxygen giver for your second brain and flood your whole system with air if you only let it.

The Principles Behind The Keep

Practically speaking, The Keep is nothing but a new organizational space, a new folder at the top of our org system. As a concept, however, it is much more, as it manifests five principles that enhance our system's oxygen pathways.

1. Simplicity

The Keep simplifies our setup significantly as it serves as a catch-all for anything that doesn’t fit our other spaces (Protocols, Efforts, Areas, or Resources). If you dread and procrastinate clearing your inboxes, this will be a game-changer, as you can now simply pipe stuff through to The Keep without that much concern for quality. Think: When in doubt, The Keep will sort it out.

2. Oneness

Oneness is the understanding that everything is interconnected, and separateness is an illusion. While categorizing with folders can help navigate reality, it hinders personal knowledge by creating silos that block natural connections. The Keep embraces this concept with its unique organizational approach: no subfolders, just a single space for everything. You’ve read that right. What leads to chaos if you implement it on your computer desktop will be the greatest power in our PKC.

3. Freedom

From oneness follows freedom — freedom from the need for structure. We no longer need to categorize and personify to create an illusion of understanding and control. With The Keep, we embrace folderlessness, and while scary in the beginning, over time, it will teach us to surf entropy.² Don’t worry, though, there is still a strategy behind all of this. But with The Keep, we want to acknowledge that fate/luck/the universe (pick your favorite) plays an important role in our lives.

4. Serendipity

We want freedom because it fosters serendipity. By avoiding rigid categorization, our notes exist in a broader space, leading to unexpected connections. With The Keep we realize that the best outcomes often arise by chance. We still can leverage interlinking to leave breadcrumbs and carve pathways, but we don’t want to solidify clusters and discoveries too soon by containerizing them. When we build structure too early, we overfit to near-term problems or problems that don’t even exist.

5. Organic Growth

To build a lasting organizational system, we need an organically evolved structure tailored to our needs. Nick Milo aptly captured this by saying that “structure must be earned.” Copying others’ structures ignores your unique use cases, challenges, quirks, and thinking patterns. Thus, The Keep imposes no structure, allowing for bottom-up organic growth.³ That is to say, at some point, clusters will emerge, and we want to solidify them with folders. However, we want that to happen much later than we usually feel comfortable with.

What Stuff Goes Into The Keep?

So, what's The Keep? Everything and nothing? A contained chaos? A mess?

What actually goes there?

The answer: Everything that has no dedicated place!

You shouldn’t be asking,»What goes into The Keep?« but rather,»What doesn’t?«. What is special enough that it deserves a dedicated place?

If you add a Keep, everything will go there by default unless you can find a good reason to put it elsewhere. Through this process, the Keep will completely transform your method of organizing personal knowledge.

Okay, wait a second. If structure is our enemy, why, then, do we need the PEAKR structure at all? Why can’t we simply put everything into a single master folder?

To answer this question, you must realize and reiterate that with PEAKR, we are interested in more than managing knowledge. We strive towards two goals.

Our first goal is to support us in PKM and building a personal knowledge base. And for this, we need no upfront structure. In fact, we are better off without it, as this way, we can better activate the principles outlined above.

The second goal of PEAKR, however, and this is the reason why we need org spaces, is that we also want to structure our lives. We want a vital few pieces of our personal knowledge to guide us, and thus, we keep everything that gives us direction within Protocols. We want highly visible, our hottest and most volitional artifacts; everything with action potential, and thus they go into a separate space called Efforts. We want a visible reminder of our roles in life and of our standards and ongoing upkeep we need to perform to keep playing the infinite game of life, which is covered by Areas. And we also need a contained place to store/file lifeless and mechanistic artifacts such as the invoice and manual for our dishwasher — for that, we have Resources. Since structuring our lives is under our subjective control, attempting to carve out an elegant way to organize it is beneficial. For our knowledge base, however, we don’t need and want this, and thus, we have a Keep.

How Does The Keep Relate to Forte’s PARA?

The Keep is a completely new organizational space. Thus, if you were to start from PARA, you'd end up with PAKRA. This means that The Keep contains subsets of what you previously placed in your "projects," "areas," "resources," and "archives," but it doesn’t fully replace any of them.

• It may contain parts of your project notes, especially if you tend to overburden project folders with potentially useful stuff. With PARA, you place something where you think it will be needed soon. Often, this means you make vague and weak connections. Instead, if it has no strong connection to a project, you can now simply drop the file in The Keep and add a link to the main project note if you deem it fruitful.

• It may contain parts of your areas, especially if you deal with an issue of areas growing too large. The areas can contain index notes that link to files in The Keep.

• It may contain parts of your resources, especially the ones that are organized just because but don’t reference frequently by category

• It may contain parts or the whole of your archives, especially some elements from the snowflake archive (not the icy one).

How Does The Keep Relate to Milo’s ACE?

In ACE, we have an Atlas org space with a container called Notes nested inside of it. In ACE, that's the closest you will find to The Keep. It’s a miscellaneous bucket for all of our notes that don’t fit anywhere else — just like in The Keep.

However, there are a few important differences:

• The Keep in PEAKR is a first-class organizational space at the top level, whereas Notes in ACE is a nested container under Atlas. It is our main knowledge base, so we don’t want it to be nested too deeply.

• The Keep contains no sub-folders whereas the Notes container in ACE proposes further division into categories such as Ideas, People, Sources etc. — In The Keep we exactly don't want that. If such structures emerge, we move them to other parts of our system.

• The Keep also contains the index notes or Maps / MOC. In vanilla ACE, they would reside in a separate container called Maps which is a sibling folder to Notes. You can query all MOCs by tags or, if really needed, put them in an MOC folder inside The Keep — but we want them really close to the actual knowledge bricks as these are our windows into our knowledge base.

Note: As of writing this, Milo is revising his system and is about to add a fourth space to his method called “x” for “Extra”. So ACE will become ACEx. Since this is only in the works and not published, I can only speculate. But I believe x — much more than Notes — will resemble the idea of The Keep. It will be the “fallback place” in our system.

The Keep Vs. The Incubator

If you have read about my idea of The Incubator, you may see some similarities here. This is no coincidence, as The Keep is its next evolution.

I once proposed to Tiago Forte that he add the incubator as a fifth category to PARA. This was his response (emphasis added by me):

I could see this modification to PARA being useful if someone is at an incredibly "divergent" stage of their life (eg, student exploring a broad variety of topics, someone looking to change careers, engaging in a big project related to self-discovery, etc.), and you literally have no idea what could be useful and therefore want to make sure it's all captured for review later. If you're in a phase of your life where you need or want to capture way more than you can action on in the short or medium term, this may be a good way to go, as the signal to noise ratio may be weak.

So, while he saw one potential use case of The Incubator, he didn’t fully buy the underlying idea that not everything we capture needs to be eventually reviewed (ever)!

Everything you add to The Keep is a bet. Many of these bets will turn out fruitless. Few of these bets will be useful in the short term. Some will have value in the medium to long term. But there is a tiny percentage of bets that may have a significant impact on our lives far down the line. Like an angel investor who knows many of his investments will fail but still seeks “unicorns” to compensate for other losses, with The Keep enter the game of hunting the extremely rare note unicorn — the single note that may change our lives.

I call this strategy feeding a someday-maybe empire (SME). And you can read more about the idea in these posts:

P.A.R.A.more #5 — P.A.R.I.A. - Unlocking the Incubator

Free To Collect + Allowed To Keep It

If you already have an incubator, it makes the perfect starting point for your Keep; just rename it. Then, start moving stuff there whenever you notice something doesn’t feel at home where it’s currently placed. The Keep will eventually contain more than your incubator ever did, and it will be used differently and more actively, but it’s the best starting point. Otherwise, start it as an empty new org space.

We Broke The PARA Universe — Now What!?

By now, we have almost completely broken PARA. At first, we substituted projects with efforts, drawing in more stuff from ARA. Then, we reserved a proper place for protocols, drawing in stuff from all over the place. We also got rid of the archives. And now, we have introduced yet another org space as the fallback for everything.

With this, we shook PARA up quite a bit. We certainly lost its clear boundaries. Most notably, however, we’ve broken away from organizing by actionability. Actionability is the core guiding principle of PARA, and it tells us where to put what and why. The most actionable stuff goes into projects so that they are the most accessible. This results in an easy algorithm or question catalog to follow for where to put/find things:

1. does it belong to an active project?

2. If not, is it related to one of my areas?

3. If not, is it a resource?

4. If not, put it in the archives.

Now, we’ve lost all of that. We’ve redefined our whole relationship with personal knowledge.

But we also gained a few things from it. With PEAKR, we now simply ask: Is there a reason for this not going to The Keep? If so, we proceed top-down as usual:

1. Is it a protocol?

2. An effort?

3. An area?

4. A resource?

This may complicate things but understand that most of our stuff will effortlessly float to The Keep, leading to much less work than we had with PARA.

Moreover, with our changes, we don’t have to always move stuff around between spaces. With PARA, any artifact may often move from project to area to project to resource to archive, etc. Such an artifact will now most likely be placed in The Keep once and remain there for good. This is a gain in simplicity and minimizes work through intelligent defaults.

Putting something close to where you’ll need it increases the likelihood that you make use of it simply because it’s more visible and nearby. This is powerful—we don’t want to lose that. And we don’t have to. We may place files into The Keep, but we can link to them from the relevant place. In fact, we can link to it from multiple places. PARA is usually implemented as a folder-based system — things have to be placed in one location. PEAKR is supposed to be a more linked-based system, at least in terms of our core knowledge base. This means that we can ensure visibility and proximity in multiple places! With a folder-based PARA, if you have several ideas where something could be useful, you will always have to make a prediction of where things will be more likely to be used. Now, you don’t have to guess; add a link to all relevant places or none. That last part is important. Most of the time, you will channel your artifacts directly to The Keep without further deliberation. With PARA, this isn’t possible. You must always make a hard and somewhat meaningless decision about whether something should go to a project, area, or resource. Technically, you could move stuff from the inbox directly into the archives, but this would make for a very awkward workflow, wouldn’t you say? Capture → Archive seems grotesque to me.

So, with PEAKR, we have less work, gain in simplicity, need less decision-making, avoid guessing, and implicitly also gain the ability to place things in multiple locations at once.

But we have lost clear boundaries and will need to make up for it. And how about the elephant in the room: Navigation — did we lose that, too?

Navigating The Keep

While to a highly top-down thinker, The Keep may result in an unnavigable blob; it is anything like that. There are still many ways to navigate the resulting "mess."

The first and most obvious one is simply browsing. In most tools, you can sort artifacts alphabetically or revers-alphabetically, which provides a way of browsing it like an encyclopedia. Within this view, you can leverage prefixes to make things float together when you see more closely related items. You can make things flow to the top or bottom with an emoji or a special character. Another way to navigate is by sorting by time. Many tools allow you to sort by created and/or modified data, which gives you a way of accessing the keep through a time machine. Navigating by recency is one of the main ways we interact with knowledge, and with The Keep, this type of navigation just became easier.

A second major way to gain organization without organizing is to leverage the views/perspectives/queries feature of modern tools support to gather somehow uniformly tagged things into a table. More technic-affine users can go way beyond that with additional tools or scripting, but luckily, most people don’t need that. Almost all PKCs support tags. So you can make use of this type of navigation even in closed tools like Evernote or lightweight solutions like Apple Notes or Google Keep. For example, I can let all my notes containing quotes float around my system in Obsidian. If I tag them with "quote," I can query them and see them in one central place without having them all in one physical location/folder. In many tools, I can even build up sophisticated tag hierarchies and approximate the power of folder hierarchies.

Of course, there's always search — a very powerful alternative way of navigation. Many tools already support fuzzy searching, where you'll find what you need even iff ti ctainz tpos. Many tools provide a “quick open” feature that is highly accessible via a shortcut and lets you quickly find almost everything you need. Furthermore, advanced search patterns can often be saved for repeated execution (even Evernote can do that in the highest price tier). With saved advanced searches, one can get Pareto-level power for tagging hierarchies without the need for tagging (beware, this takes some practice, and personally, I haven’t found many uses for it). Lastly, not too far in the future, search will be AI-powered and consider much more your context, making it even more powerful.

Browsing, views, tags, and searching are powerful ways to organize things without folders. Since they don’t require us to containerize and silo up files and notes, they provide much more oxygen for our second brain. However, the main way to navigate The Keep is by link traversal. And while the other ways are helpful additions, it is by creating and navigating through links that we will build up our knowledge base. Whenever you make a creative connection, you reinforce it by materializing it as a link between two notes. Over time, strong pathways will emerge that suit your unique mind the best, and you will find it easier and easier to find notes through existing relationships that you develop organically.

Check out Linking Your Thinking for a great resource on how to focus more on links than folders.

Conclusion

Another post, another evolution of our organizational method and acronym. In our evolving system, The Keep sits between Areas and Resources, somewhat replacing and building on the idea of the Incubator. This leads us from PEAR to PEAKR.

This is a small change in letters but a powerful shift in concept and approach. Also, instead of fruit, our mascot is now a person ascending a mountain, which resembles a lot more closely what we are doing here: knowledge building.

However, the keen observer may have noticed something. We still miss a letter! PEAKR is no word, even though it's very close. So we still need to find the last E to complete it. And what about the problem of clear PARA boundaries we broke? We’ll certainly also need to smooth out the remaining rough edges of the system. And remember all that about org methods being “PARAsites” at the beginning of this season? Have we overcome that? Not quite, …

So, we have work to do in this series's next and last part. But one thing should now be obvious: by the end of it, nothing of PARA will remain, and we’ll have moved completely beyond it. Whether this new system we end up with aligns with your goals, you must decide for yourself. But if you want to become instead of merely produce, if you want to grow while outputting, if you want a system for life, no matter the trajectory it’ll take, then make sure you don’t miss the culmination of this series!

Do you maintain a Keep or something similar in your system?

Please let us know in the comments 👇

1. Many of your efforts won’t even take the form of projects. However, even if all you do is churn out projects, the number of completed projects still doesn’t guarantee productivity or meaningful progress.

2. If this sounds too WooWoo, take it for a test drive before you judge. Serendipities - defined as “meaningful coincidences” - are a fact of life. The best things in life seem to happen out of pure chance. For instance, I met my wife traveling the other side of the planet, and our son came earlier than expected, triggering a chain of effects that led me to buy a house — something that I never wanted. Most of the time, the serendipities in our knowledge base are less impactful. But as Gump says, you’ll never know what you’ll get. After all, I started this whole Substack based on a single small note I had taken about fractals at some point. Now, it's grown to a small knowledge castle with over 70 essays and 300 readers.

3. For those familiar with Milo’s work, his concept of “maps of content” (MOCs) is an example of a way to earn structure. MOCs are index notes that form clusters of related concepts. When consolidating knowledge, create a note linking various others, tying them into a greater context. Within Milo’s system, these MOCs are stored away from the notes. With The Keep, they stay right next to the notes that birthed them. However, MOCs are just one way to earn structure. The Keep goes way deeper than that.