Confession! I Gave Up The PARA Method...
Confession! I Gave Up The PARA Method...
Why I no longer support and neither recommend PARA to anyone.
I no longer use the PARA method in my task artifact manager, browser, or even my personal knowledge companion. While some of its principles still resonate within my system, my modded version of PARA—“PARIA”—which I relied on for the longest time, didn’t quite provide the foundation I needed for the next chapter of my life.
If you’re curious about what I use now—my very own method called PEAKER—you’re welcome to dive into my in-depth series, Beyond PARA: Surpassing the PARA & ACE Methods. But today, I want to focus on one slice of this larger shift: realizing that over the last few years, I had overloaded my task artifact manager (Todoist) with too many responsibilities. I’m not necessarily talking about pseudo-task creep but more about deeper structural and conceptual issues.
PARA is an organizational system with a main focus on note apps. However, one of its key ideas is to mirror this setup in many other tools, like your task artifact manager (TAM). The idea is simple: if you have a project with the same name in your note and task management software, you have a relatively easy way to move between the two. That’s what I did for many years. The problem was that once I implemented PARA in my task artifact manager, I didn’t simply adopt a new way to organize my tasks. It actually changed the philosophy of how I worked. You can read more about this here:
It took me a while to realize that besides task artifact management, my Todoist had attracted all kinds of other practices: personal project management (PM), personal program management (PPM), and even bits of reference management (wish lists).
It was time to simplify. I wanted my task artifact manager to do what it does best: manage tasks and only manage tasks.
Back to the Roots: Stripping Task Artifact Management Down to Its Essence
I’ve said before that the task can be considered the atom of accomplishment, and I’ve come to believe it’s the only work unit that always deserves dedicated treatment. While I’ve previously written about the importance of dedicated task management, I kept mingling disciplines. However, I now see that I mistakenly treated projects and programs as actionable as tasks, placing them all in the same space.
PARA played a part in this misconception, but only because its creator, Tiago Forte, had previously been biased by his tooling before that. Most popular task managers1 label groupings of task artifacts as “projects.” A “task” is seen as a standalone unit, but two related tasks? That makes a project! In Things, the task artifact manager Forte uses, next to projects, there’s also the concept of areas (see now, where the PA in PARA comes from!?), while in other tools, such as Todoist, go as far as calling everything a project. You’ve read that right! If in Todoist, I want to create a time-based bucket called “THIS WEEK,” it’s called a project.2 That’s how natural it has become to embed project management functionality and terminology into task artifact managers. While it’s obviously wrong, it is the reality. And it may be why we are all trying to manage projects in our task artifact managers. This is a vivid manifestation of what I call project obsession.
So, what does pure task artifact management look like?
To engage and take daily action, all I really need in front of me are task artifacts. Projects and programs, while relevant during planning sessions like weekly or monthly reviews, have no place complicating day-to-day execution. Stripping these away leaves us with a clear view: one list of small actionable pieces of text.
However, since the average person with thorough capture mechanics will accumulate well above a hundred such task artifacts in a relatively short time, some organization is helpful. There are many ways to do this, and many methods can work.3 Choosing one depends largely on personal preference. I opted for a time-based grouping into This Week, Next Week, and Later since I have a solid weekly review in place and am flexible enough to decide when I work on what during each week.
Essentially, I have pruned my Todoist into a modular, focused component of my productivity system—a smaller, sharper tool without unnecessary fluff. This change stripped my task artifact manager of all excessive responsibilities and moved it back to its core role of managing task artifacts.4
Benefits of Pure Task Artifact Management
So far, my change has brought about several advantages:
Simplified task artifact management: My task artifact manager is leaner, clearer, and easier to manage.
Less vendor lock-in: My new setup reduces my dependency on one specific tool. Migrating to another tool is much easier now.5
Focus on core competencies: My TAM can now concentrate on managing task artifacts without awkward workarounds for projects or other non-task entities.
Less manual work: Managing projects involved many manual steps—creating, moving, modifying, and archiving. My new system eliminates that hassle (it moves it to another place).6
Easier integration: With this simple system, integrating my Todoist with other tools also becomes potentially easier. For instance, I sync my daily tasks to my Obsidian daily notes. But I could just as well sync “this week’s tasks”. Syncing projects and programs, however, wouldn’t have been possible, and now its a non-issue.
But there’s another big win: this shift let me move back from unit-based task management to a more calendar-based system. This change simplifies my workflow by orders of magnitude. Gone are the days of managing projects in my task manager. No more creating, naming, nesting, or archiving projects. I’ve realized that the overhead of unit-based task management (aka PM & PPM) inside my TAM added little value overall.
Why Not Keep Tasks, Projects, and Programs Together?
Because you don’t need it!
When you have sorted out task artifacts and scheduled them into a bucket called THIS WEEK, you don’t need to know which project or program they belong to while working on them. You can just engage and execute. That’s really all there is. Besides, you usually know which project a task belongs to anyway even if there is no project bucket or tag attached to it ;)
Some might see this as a step backward. What about easily referring back to the respective projects’ or programs’ reference material? And why not keep anything work action related in a centralized and single place? What if I want to distinguish between work and personal tasks? Or if I have a lot more smaller tasks to handle?7
Those are questions for another time. For now, just know that this leaner system works just as well or even better than before! More than that: I bet it’ll work for you, too. So, if you currently still rely on any kind of “project buckets” in your TAM, it’s time to reconsider and streamline your setup.
I no longer need to rely on projects in my task artifact manager. I think I never did. It was only just a bad dream that I had slowly been woken up from. And so can you!
Task artifact management can truly be simple as long as you don’t overcomplicate it.
Todoist (what I use), Things (what Forte uses), TickTick (what fancy hipsters use), etc.
A second way to achieve this in Todoist is to use a “filter” based on due dates. But it’s only a workaround since a filter is only a dynamically assembled “view” and not a real bucket where one can put things. I can, for instance, not put a task without a due date set to sometime next week into it. Yet another way would be to tag functions with the label “this week,” enabling you to put task artifacts without due dates into a filter of the same name. But that feels like a lot of work for what arguably should be the default state.
If we were to group them by physical location (e.g., at work, home, on the train, …), we would essentially arrive at GTD. If we order them according to importance and urgency, we will arrive at the Eisenhower Matrix. If we separate them by where they are in a lifecycle (ideation, to-do, next, WIP, backlog), we get Kanban. If we divide them into TODAY and TOMORROW, we arrive at the Do It Tomorrow. If we keep them all in one big list, we arrive at some lesser-known but also common “master list” systems.
Higher-level units like projects and programs are now part of my knowledge companion’s responsibilities (Obsidian).
A quick anecdote: I once tried, as an experiment, to migrate my tasks from Todoist to TickTick using TickTick’s auto-import from Todoist. It failed due to my overly complicated setup and me having more than 50 “projects.” Now, with this cleaner system, this would have worked seamlessly.
I wish I could report that this change also made me spend less time in Todoist as a form of efficiency gain. However, my time-tracking data doesn’t support this. It's hard to tell from my data, but if anything, I spend a little bit more time in Todoist now, after the change. However, I know that the time in Todosit is now spent on task artifact management and not on anything else. From this, I conclude that I do more of it, which can also be a positive thing.
For your information, I currently complete about 30-50 tasks per week. If you are a magnitude below or above that, other approaches may work better. With a magnitude below that, i.e., 3-5 tasks per week (in which case it’s quite unlikely you’ve captured everything relevant), you may need to TAM at all. Your mind may suffice! On the other hand, if you are a magnitude above that, i.e. 300-500 tasks per week (also unlikely, but maybe possible), you may need a more refined and efficient setup. I don’t know what that could look like since I’ve never dealt with such workloads.