±PEAKER: The Ultimate Org Method for the Fourth Age of Digital Organization
Why You Can’t Build a Life on Prompts & Search Results; And How to Build Clarity, Growth, and a Life Well-Lived Instead
In 1945, as World War II was ending, a striking essay titled As We May Think appeared in The Atlantic. Vannevar Bush, then head of U.S. scientific research, described a desk-like machine he called the Memex, short for “memory extender.” The Memex would store books, notes, and records, linking them into trails that mirrored human thought. You could follow these trails to see how ideas are connected and share them with others. Long before computers as we know them, Bush was sketching a conceptual blueprint for a thinking partner, something like my more modern idea of a Personal Knowledge Companion.
Today, 80 years later, we seem closer than ever to realizing his vision. We’ve moved far beyond microfilm. Modern tools can summarize, link, and retrieve information in milliseconds. With a few words, we can surface notes from years ago. On the surface, it looks as if Bush’s dream has come true. And yet, something feels off.
We’ve built machines that fetch facts but not meaning. We have more tools, but also more noise. More access, but less clarity. The deeper problem Bush pointed to hasn’t been solved. If anything, it has only sharpened: how do we design systems that not just store knowledge but help us make sense of it?
Part of the answer to that question is surely internal. It’s about how we think, reflect, and connect ideas—about the efficiency of thought itself. I explore that side of things in Part 1 of my book Scale-Smart. But just as important is the external side: how we engage with and shape the world and the artifacts around us.
I believe digital organization structures can play a significant role in this regard.
To keep knowledge usable, we need some form of structure. Modern tools can search, summarize, and retrieve, but they aren’t enough. You can’t build a meaningful life on prompts and search results alone. AI can shape the digital world for you, but if your mental world doesn’t follow, you’ll get lost. You can’t rely on your memory to hold together all the loose threads that matter, and you can’t connect the dots between things you never remembered in the first place. The human brain excels at sensing, reacting, and making connections in the moment, but it struggles to juggle complexity or retain large volumes of information over time. It wasn’t built for the modern environment we live in.
Without external support, the mind becomes overwhelmed, and things slip away. That’s why even with AI, structure matters. Without it, you lose visibility—the quiet confidence of knowing where something lives. You lose stigmergy—the ability to navigate by spatial memory. You lose solidity, because tags and queries, while flexible, are brittle and break with a single typo. And you lose divide-and-conquer—the power to zoom in, narrow the scope, and focus on what matters.
Digital structure, then, isn’t just about staying in control—it can be a key enabler of clarity. How and why we store digital assets is about far more than mere storage and retrieval. It’s about rhythm, direction, and context. Without it, even if you feel more flexible or free, you end up reacting instead of building, regurgitating instead of thinking, and running in circles instead of growing.
So the question returns—not just as a technical puzzle, but as a human one:
What kind of structure matters, even in an age of AI?
What kind of system can grow with us instead of getting in the way?
Can we finally build and use a true Memex as Bush envisoned it?
In this essay, I’ll share my answers to these questions. I’ll present you with what I believe to be the ultimate organizational method for your digital space, one that allows you to easily retrieve, efficiently output, and creatively think, and, above all, grow as a person.
If you make it through this essay and have any questions about the
±PEAKERorg method I share, please comment below. I aim to continually improve this essay to reach an increasing number of people who may benefit from it.
The Four Ages of Digital Organization
Every digital organization method is shaped and built around a core belief — a reason we bother to organize at all. Over time, that belief has undergone drastic changes.
In the early days, the goal was simple: store now, find later. This was the age of retrievability. Later, we learned to separate the actionable from the rest, ushering in the age of actionability. Then came the age of sense-making. Structure wasn’t just for doing anymore — it became a tool for thinking, learning, and connecting ideas. In theory, this was the birth of the first real Memexes.
And now, with AI woven into our tools — summarizing, surfacing, linking — a fourth age is emerging. But paradoxically, this age centers on the person, not the system. It’s no longer about building the perfect Memex. It’s about exploring how we can use a Memex to guide our personal growth.
❶ The Archive Age
In the early days of personal computing, through the late 1990s, the goal of digital organization was simple: store fast & find later. The guiding principle behind all efforts of digital organization was simply retrievability.
The defining element of this first age was the strict technological limits it had to work with. Storage was scarce, filenames were capped at eight characters (like PLNQ4.TXT), and without proper search, folders were the only way to encode meaning. People built deep paths such as C:\WORK\REPORTS\1997\Q4 and relied on a kind of spatial memory—stigmergy—to navigate these nested structures.1
There aren’t many records of organizational structures from this time. People did not have many digital files to start with, and blogs had not even been invented. But a modern echo of Archive Age thinking is the org method called Johnny.Decimal. It works by assigning every folder a number within a defined range — such as 10–19 for “Finances,” 20–29 for “Health,” and so on — and nesting files at no more than two levels. Though only formerly introduced in 2014, it reflects the exact values of the first age of organization: structure, clarity, and precision, aimed at retrievability. Numbered folders and scoped categories promise less stress and faster lookup.
Unfortunately, org structures based on a “neat archive” mentality are both rigid and ambiguous. Rigid, because once you decide on a folder structure, everything has to fit within it, even as your needs evolve. Ambiguous, because real-world items rarely belong in just one place. Is a car invoice filed under “Car” or “Finances”? Are vacation photos stored in “Images” or “Travel”? These semantic collisions create friction. And as classification research has long shown, there is no and can’t ever be a perfect taxonomy. Categories inevitably blur as most information is multifaceted, and forcing it into a single slot often distorts its meaning.2
For static files, such as invoices, contracts, and manuals, first age org methods like Johnny.Decimal work just fine. However, for ideas, drafts, and evolving research, these methods fall short. To foster creative output, things need to collide and connect in unexpected ways. They need to pop up serendipitously. Locking them into strict folders or fixed personal taxonomies doesn’t just cause friction — it stifles creativity and buries valuable insights. You end up siloing your knowledge instead of letting it breathe.
The Archive Age led us to create digital warehouses. While these traditional systems might look tidy, they are brittle. Folders go stale. Files drift. Duplicates are only a matter of time. The structure is orderly in theory, but cluttered in practice. And eventually, even that order slips.
❷ The Action Age
By the early 2000s, a shift began to occur. Technological limits began to be lifted. The digital space was no longer just a place to store things — it was where a lot of work took place. Email, calendars, cloud storage, and mobile devices made one thing clear: some information moves and demands action.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001) captured this shift and changed the landscape. His core insight — that information is either actionable or not — changed how people thought about digital organization. If you mixed the two, the urgent drowned in the inert. GTD offered a clean workflow: collect, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. However, GTD was primarily an action management system; it didn’t so much address where large amounts of digital reference information should reside, because much of our personal information was still analog at the time. Besides, GTD is dying.
In 2016, by the time tools like Evernote and OneNote started to gain traction, Tiago Forte extended the ideas of GTD and introduced PARA: an org method built on actionability instead of topics. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives, and instead of Where does it go? It asked, What is this for?
This was the heart of the Action Age. Digital organization became about momentum, not just storage. The goal of organizing became: store to progress. And the underlying organizing principle shifted from retrievability to actionability. Systems were now judged by how well they surfaced priorities and kept materials ready for execution. PARA’s appeal was huge, especially for freelancers and creators juggling dozens of small projects. It became a kind of common language for productivity in the PKM space. And it turned organization from a warehouse into a workbench. Your system adapted as projects evolved and priorities shifted.
However, the Action Age had its blind spots. PARA’s focus on output often overlooks the raw inputs of creative work—fleeting thoughts, half-finished drafts, unformed ideas. It made everything a project. Over time, a quiet pressure settled in: if a note didn’t belong to a project, did it matter? If a thought didn’t lead to action, was it wasted?
The PARA org method brought clarity and progress, but also narrowed the scope of what felt worth capturing. The system began to privilege completion over curiosity. Exploration felt less legitimate if it didn’t end in a deliverable.
PARA helped many people move—but it also set the stage for the next shift: from doing to thinking, from constant momentum to deeper meaning.
❸ The Association Age
By the early 2020s, digital life had undergone another transformation. Always-on access and an ever-increasing flood of information revealed a new truth: organization could no longer focus just on doing—it also had to support better thinking. More people began organizing not to ship projects, but to connect ideas, see patterns, and build personal wikis.
Tools like Roam Research and Obsidian made this possible. In part, inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, they introduced bidirectional links, making it easy to create dense webs of knowledge instead of static hierarchies. For the first time, the average person could trace their thoughts across time—trails that felt close to Bush’s original vision of the Memex.
This shift brought us into the Association Age, where the goal of organization changed again: from action to sense-making. The guiding principle for third-age org methods is intentionality. Whenever you sat down to work, you weren’t just asking, What do I need to do? but also, What do I want to explore?
Yet most people hadn’t even embraced the second age of organization, let alone reached this third. While more people were sharing their learnings online, few robust methods emerged to shape this new mode of work.
One exception was ACEx by Nick Milo. ACEx gave structure to thinking with three spaces: Atlas (knowledge maps), Calendar (time-bound notes), and Efforts (active work). It was neither a warehouse nor a workshop—it was a space for thinking. A place to ask not what to finish, but what to consider.
Like PARA before it, ACEx resonated deeply, but with a different tribe: learners, wanderers, and creators—those for whom notes were ends in themselves, not just means to an output.
In 2023, I proposed EARA—a hybrid of PARA and ACEx that aimed to blend action and association, structure and emergence. It recognized that both systems had strengths and limits: PARA was clear and efficient, but often too linear. ACEx was rich and reflective, but sometimes unbounded. EARA was a bridge—and a stepping stone. It hinted at what might come next: a more human-centered system that could adapt as we grow.
❹ The Awareness Age
In recent years, something deeper has emerged. As technology advances—AI, the cyberverse, ever more powerful tools—our systems are no longer just for storing, acting, or even thinking. They’re for living. For staying grounded in what matters, adapting through change, and helping us become who we are. It’s no longer enough to organize just to get things done or think better. People want something more lasting: a cockpit for the self. A LifeOS.
This marks the beginning of the Awareness Age—a new era shaped by human needs and the capabilities of AI. As tools grow more context-aware and adaptive, it’s easy to think that where or how we store things no longer matters. But that’s only true on the surface. Even in 2025 and beyond, we still need to retrieve fast, scope efforts clearly, and make sense of complexity. Search and prompting still rely on memory. You can’t retrieve what you don’t remember exists. Automation has changed how we use our systems, but it hasn’t replaced the need for structure.
That’s why I call them the four ages of digital organization, not stages. They’re not steps in a tidy sequence. They’re layers. Like the brain itself, which built a limbic system on top of the reptilian brain, and then a neocortex above that, our “second brains” can’t discard the past to reinvent the future. They have to build on it. We began with archiving, moved into action, then into association and sense-making. Now, we’re entering the fourth age: storing to raise awareness.
The challenge of this age is durability. The Archive Age lasted several decades. The Action Age may be ten to twenty. The Association Age is barely five years old and already being tested by accelerating change. Life moves faster now, and so must our systems. We need a method that evolves not just with our work, but with us.
Systems like PARA and ACEx work — for a while, for some. But many eventually outgrow the worldview behind them. PARA is built on actionability. ACEx is built on exploration. Yet life demands that we move between the two, often without warning. A job loss, a new child, a health crisis, a creative breakthrough — and suddenly the old categories don’t fit. PARA is too linear. It ships but doesn’t reflect. ACEx is too fluid. It reflects but doesn’t ship. If you’ve ever spent hours refining your vault instead of using it, you’ve felt that tension.
Alignment means more than acting quickly. It means acting wisely. Not just managing inputs and outputs, but shaping systems that reflect your values, your priorities, your season of life. The systems we need now must support growth, not just goals. They must help us see clearly, decide deliberately, and move with integrity.
Over time, I came to believe this: For a system to last, it must rest on a principle that doesn’t expire. That’s why the fourth age centers on alignment and realignment. Instead of anchoring to a single ideal — retrievability, actionability, or intentionality — you organize around responsiveness. You let alignment guide the shape. A system built for this age must combine structured storage (like Johnny.Decimal), focused execution (like PARA), and emergent thinking (like ACEx). But it can’t be anchored in function. It must anchor in you — your values, your priorities, your current season, because alignment isn’t a destination. It’s a rhythm — a continuous return to what matters most.
That’s where my ±PEAKER method comes in. It’s a method designed to hold clarity, growth, and integrity as your life evolves. ±PEAKER balances progress and perspective, discipline and grace. It fractals with you, scaling up or down as needed. It respects multiple time scales, modes of effort, and ways of knowing. And most of all, it keeps you grounded — in what matters, in what’s next, in who you are becoming.
The core truth of ±PEAKER is simple: Life doesn’t move in straight lines. It spirals. It accelerates. It pauses. It breaks. Most productivity systems don’t handle that well. PARA was great for building momentum, but it was brittle with anything else. ACEx was great for surfacing insights, but it could cause you to drift far from where you intended to go. ±PEAKER aims to strike a balance between progress and perspective, discipline and grace. It’s a system that works with you, zooming in and scaling up when needed, zooming out and scaling down when things shift. It recognizes multiple time scales, modes of effort, and ways of knowing. And most of all, it keeps you grounded. In what matters. In what’s next. In who you are becoming.
The Awareness Age isn’t about working harder or thinking faster. It’s about living with more clarity. Making sense of yourself and your environment in a world that never stops shifting. That’s no longer a niche problem. It’s the problem. And it’s what ±PEAKER was built to meet.
Introducing The ±PEAKER METHOD
±PEAKER is a fourth-age organizational method — one that doesn’t just help you store, act, or make sense of information, but enables you to become. It’s built for those seeking systems that evolve with their lives. Systems are not just for function, but for growth.
Unlike the simpler methods of earlier ages, ±PEAKER deliberately embraces complexity. It’s designed for a world where tools are more innovative, automation is more accessible, and maintenance is no longer a barrier to progress. It’s overhead compared to simpler methods, once viewed as a cost, is now seen as an opportunity.
The name ±PEAKER is an acronym, made up of the eight org spaces, the root-level categories that form its foundation:
+ Inbox: Your default dropzone for everything unqualified or incoming.
- Outbox: A pendant to the physical out-tray. It’s for moribund stuff phasing out of life
1 Protocols: Codified direction; a compass built from goals, values, workflows, …
2 Efforts: The engine, where active projects, programs, and structured experiments live.
3 Arcade: For upholding roles & responsibilities (routines, reviews, rituals, and upkeep).
4 Keep: A structureless knowledge base for creative thinking and sense-making.
5 Exclave: An exploratory frontier for heavy reference material & emerging clusters.
6 Records: Cold storage for static, fixed, and lifeless artifacts.
Each space has a clear purpose. Some are built for flow. Others for preservation. Together, they form a living system that scales with your life. ±PEAKER isn’t a static structure. It’s a flexible scaffolding for growth. One that adapts with you, through changes in season, energy, identity, and role. In what follows, I’ll explore each space more deeply and show how they work together to support alignment over time.
Inbox & Outbox (±)
Inbox.The ± zone is the entry and exit point of your system; the liminal layer between chaos and order.
The Inbox (+) is your digital intake. It serves as a temporary landing pad for unprocessed materials. Notes, ideas, tasks, links — anything you haven’t qualified yet arrives here. It’s not a place to store things. It’s a triage pad. Review it regularly and route items to their proper home.
The Outbox (–) works like a physical out tray. It’s where you place things that are leaving your system: drafts ready to be shipped, files to be archived, or items you’re done with but not yet deleted. It offers a gentle buffer before final departure, allowing you to release without rushing.
Together, ± forms a qualification zone, a lightweight gate that keeps noise from flooding into your core spaces or staying there for too long. It’s fast, frictionless, and easy to maintain. In a sense, it’s the bloodstream of ±PEAKER: always in motion, constantly cycling material through.
1 Protocols
Protocols.Personal protocols are the explicit rules, commitments, and guidelines you choose to follow. They form the scaffolding that supports you as you uphold your standards and grow into the person you want to become. In other words, protocols guide your becoming and codify your direction.
Whether you write them down or not, you already have many protocols in your life: stories you tell yourself, rules you follow, ways you measure what matters. But it’s only when you map them into a central place that they become concrete and visible. When you do, they can offer clarity when decisions feel murky, stability when circumstances shift, a sense of meaning behind your projects, a mirror to see how you’ve evolved, and a rhythm to return to when you drift.
This is precisely why, in ±PEAKER, they live at the very top, just below ±, in a dedicated primary space called Protocols.
To give you a sense of what this space might hold, here are some examples of sub-containers I keep there:
annual-themes – a log of past and current yearly focuses
codex – personal legends: emoji legends, highlight codes, naming conventions
core-values – notes exploring the values I aim to live by
principles – my core guiding principles in life
goal-setting – systems and rituals for planning
favorite-quotes – a treasury of words that resonate deeply, and I return to
life-design – vision documents, retreats, and reflections
my-profile – notes about my personality, quirks, joys, and fears
shine – practices and prompts that help me feel radiant and on track
SOPs – personal checklists and operating procedures
realms – the major “arenas” of my life
When I first wrote about the Protocols space, I argued that Age 2 and Age 3 methods are powerful, but neither makes space for self-realization as a primary function. Protocols fill that gap. They put your life’s compass front and center. Not hidden in an Area folder, not scattered among projects, but visible, and always ready to reorient you. When life gets noisy, Protocols remind you what matters. When everything feels stuck, they offer clarity. When things fall apart, they help you rebuild from your core.
Protocols help you turn your second brain from a product factory into a lab for personal growth; a nourishing environment where what you create becomes a by-product of who you are becoming.
2 Efforts
Efforts.Efforts are endeavours that eventually conclude. They are the visible expressions of where you place your energy and attention. They form the living map that shows what you’re exploring, building, or bringing to completion. In other words, efforts capture your motion and reveal the shape of your working life.
Whether you track them or not, you already have many efforts underway—initiatives large and small, some urgent, some exploratory, some simply ongoing. But it’s only when you gather them into a single space that you see them clearly. When you do, this space becomes a map of your commitments. It can offer perspective when you feel overwhelmed, help you spot what no longer matters, and remind you which pursuits deserve your energy most.
In ±PEAKER, there is a dedicated space to capture this called Efforts. This space is the fruit of the Action Age of digital organization that was focused on forward motion. But there is a reason why we speak of Efforts instead of Projects. Namely, we want to break the habit of seeing everything as a “project”. Not everything needs a deadline or a measurable deliverable. Some efforts are tiny. Some are massive. Some are slow-burning and never quite fit the “project” mold. Not all efforts need the overhead of a formal project. Some are experiments. Some are habits. Some are half-built but still ongoing. The point is to make effort visible — to see what deserves attention and what can be let go.
The main idea of the Efforts space is that you represent each of your efforts in its natural size (the size it wants to be in) and as a separate note (an effort note). For example, currently my Efforts space holds, among others:
FPS Book – my central hub for writing and refining my book
Toddler Jago – supporting my son’s growth during these crucial years
Master Testdays – a program to improve calorie discipline on high-friction days
Quarters Old – a project building a tiny app MVP
Daily Reading – tracking and reflecting on my essay reading experiment in Q2
If you need more structure, you can introduce containers. I currently keep:
New – ideas I might tackle next
Pending – paused or waiting on something
Aborted – efforts I’ve let go, but don’t want to forget
Experiments – small or slow-burn trials with defined learning intent
Importantly, you can structure (and restructure) this space however you like: by domain (work, personal), by unit (actions, tasks, projects, programs), by type (e.g. challenges, experiments, reading, watching,…), or by state (active, paused, done) or by any combination of them.
The Efforts org space is the Gemba of your second brain; the place where action happens. It holds everything that draws on your energy. It doesn’t optimize for output. It reveals motion. It reveals where your attention truly lies. It’s a focal omnipresent context for all the weight you are carrying; it maps your life force as holistically as possible and forms your personal effort map.
3 Arcade
Arcade.An aspiration is an evolving pursuit that shapes who you become. You might aspire to raise children, earn a degree, become well-read, or master a craft. Most aspirations are grand by nature, slow arcs that can take a lifetime to realize. They are rarely precise, because you can’t fully grasp something before you’ve grown into it. However, they also manifest in a clearer form that we can better handle: roles.
Whether you name them or not, you already carry many roles: parent, partner, creator. Some you inherit, some you choose. But it’s only when you map them into a single space that they become visible and alive. When you do, this space becomes a touchstone. It reminds you of the standards you’ve set, shows you which arcs are thriving or neglected, and helps you aim a little higher every day.
In ±PEAKER, these roles live in a dedicated space called the Arcade. The Arcade is where you store the artifacts that help you grow into the roles you’ve chosen. Each container here is more than a label—it’s a living arc of your life. Instead of vague categories like “Health” or “Finance,” the Arcade organizes your system around identity: who you are and who you’re becoming. A role-based folder like “Father” isn’t just a stale bucket. It encodes commitment.
Here are some examples of role-based containers I keep there:
Father – how I show up for my child
Husband – my marriage and partnership
Home Owner – caring for our space and investments
Strong Avatar – tending to health, discipline, and vitality
Truth Seeker – cultivating lifelong learning and curiosity
Liberty Man – growing personal freedom and sovereignty
Vagabonder – sustaining the spirit of travel and simplicity
Author – the craft and practice of writing
Employee – professional standards and growth
Person of Stature – cultivating presence and character
I first introduced the Arcade in A Hothouse for Embers. There, I wrote that arcs are more than standards to maintain. They are ideals you may never fully reach. The point isn’t to “complete” a role but to keep evolving within it.
Importantly, this means that only relevant artifacts should land here. For example, in my Father arc, I only keep things that help me fulfill my role as a parent and guardian to my son: a list of developmental milestones, a journal of reflections and precious moments, a document on his health issues, and a list of potential presents. What does not live here is his birth certificate, a scan of his passport, or documents related to child benefits. All of these belong in the Records space instead.
The shift away from generic areas toward role-based arcs isn’t always easy and might take time to get used to. But it has a significant advantage. Familiar labels like “Finance” attract a wide range of lifeless documents. A folder called “Family Provider” makes the purpose unmistakably clear. When in doubt, ask yourself whether an artifact helps you directly fulfill your role. While you may need to yield the birth certificate or passport of your kids, they won’t make you a better parent. That’s why they belong somewhere else.
4 Keep
Keep.The Keep is the most unconventional space in ±PEAKER. Unlike the other spaces, it comes with a single, strict constraint: no subfolders. Instead of carving up your notes into categories, you navigate The Keep through links, tags, search, and, increasingly, AI assistance.
Where other spaces emphasize clarity and containment, The Keep invites openness. It’s your playground for sense-making, reflection, and discovery. Here, your ideas, questions, and fragments gather before they mature into something more. In this way, The Keep embodies the spirit of the Association Age.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely already collecting stray notes, quotes, sketches, and half-formed thoughts. Perhaps you hoped to discover the ideal system for organizing them. Instead, I’ll suggest the opposite: throw them all into one big bucket and let them breathe.
This lack of upfront structure is intentional. When you stop forcing every idea into a folder, patterns emerge on their own. Connections form. Clusters take shape. And the pressure to organize too soon dissolves.
In ±PEAKER, The Keep sits alongside Protocols, Efforts, and the Arcade, but it serves a different purpose: it holds anything that doesn’t clearly belong elsewhere. This doesn’t mean it’s a junk drawer. It’s an intentional space of creative entropy — a place where you can trust that meaning will eventually surface.
Here are a few examples of what lives in my own Keep:
Quotes that resonate
Concept sketches and metaphors
Notes from interesting conversations
Half-developed frameworks
Stray ideas and theory fragments
Questions I’m still circling
Personal insights that don’t fit elsewhere
…
When I first introduced this idea, I wrote that The Keep is built on five principles:
Simplicity – When in doubt, put it in The Keep. You don’t have to overthink whether it’s “important” yet.
Oneness – Everything here shares the same space. No subfolders. No silos.
Freedom – You don’t have to categorize or force structure before it’s useful.
Serendipity – Loose connections often lead to surprising insights.
Organic Growth – Clusters that prove useful over time can graduate into their own dedicated spaces.
The Keep isn’t about having everything tidy. It’s about keeping your knowledge alive — oxygen flowing, ideas moving, connections forming. And again, instead of folders, you navigate it through links, tags, search, and AI. Over time, meaningful pathways emerge naturally. And once a cluster becomes strong enough, you promote it out of The Keep to another org space, often The Exclave.
The Keep is especially powerful for thinkers, writers, and builders — anyone who uncovers meaning by connecting, rather than classifying. It helps you avoid tunnel vision by holding thoughts lightly until they ripen. It asks you to trust that clarity will come in its own time, without forcing it too soon.
5 Exclave
Exclave.The Exclave is the space for “glowing formations in transit.” It holds notes and materials that aren’t fully active, but aren’t dead either. They’re somewhere in between—hatching, hovering, slowly crystallizing.
The Exclave holds various kinds of things, one of which we already encountered: promising clusters that once lived in The Keep, but have begun to take shape. But it also stores half-formed ideas, references you’re not done with, and long-term seeds waiting to sprout.
You might think of it as your digital greenhouse, a warm middle zone between action and archive. Not quite a project, not quite a reference, but maybe soon. It’s also a holding pen for things you haven’t fully let go of. Past Areas you’ve phased out. Old efforts that might return. Highlighted texts, early drafts, and emerging insights. This is where they gather. Together, they form a kind of long-term memory — active enough to revisit, dormant enough not to demand attention.
When I first explored this space, I called it Embers. That warmth is the point. The Exclave gives your system breathing room. It keeps meaningful things alive without demanding constant attention. In PARA, you’d scatter these across Archives and Resources. In ±PEAKER, they live together, glowing softly until they’re either reignited or released.
Here are a few examples of what I keep in my Exclave:
CoreRen – support material for my home renovation program
Body Sculptor Initiative –background docs for my weight loss journey
Articles – online essays I wanted to keep as a whole (very few)
Book Reviews – short book reviews I’ve written
Book Summaries – more extended book summaries I’ve written
Book Summaries (Raw) – summaries I’ve collected from others
Books – digital books in PDF or EPUB format
Chia’s Driver’s License – a container for the bureaucracy I manage around my wife’s driving exam
Readwise – synced highlights from books I’ve read
Talks – notes on speeches, TEDs, and influential talks
Workshops – materials from workshops I’ve given or taken
The Exclave is a kind of long-term memory — active enough to revisit, dormant enough not to distract. It’s where you keep things alive, but gently. When you’re ready, you can move them forward. When you’re not, you can let them rest without guilt.
6 Records
Records.Records are the filing cabinet of ±PEAKER. A neutral, utilitarian space for lifeless material — the stuff you don’t need to think about but still have to keep handy. Invoices, contracts, manuals, templates, backups. Files that don’t evolve, don’t inspire, and don’t need your attention. Just part of life. As such, Records echo the Archive Age: precise, inert, retrievable. Nothing more — and nothing less.
When I first wrote about this space, I lamented that, in PARA, this kind of material often had no clear home. It was shoved into Resources or Areas, creating confusion — is this invoice part of “Work” or “Finance”? — and cluttering your active system. Records fixes that. It’s a place for the necessary but inert. Nothing here asks for your energy. It just waits to be retrieved when needed.
Think of Records as a low-friction vault. Nothing moves. Nothing links. It just sits there, neatly filed by type. Here are some examples of what I keep in my own Records:
journal – daily, weekly, monthly notes with journal entries
logs – system or process logs, e.g. weight, diet, etc.
templates – writing and planning templates
backups – e.g. Goodreads export, podcast data
tax-receipts – receipts for annual filing
manuals – product and software instructions
config – exported settings or preferences
insurance, finance, employments – classic paperwork
guitar-tabs – music sheets from years ago
images – downloaded or purchased images not from my iPhone
cupra-león – documents for my company car
homepage – exported or archived website content
cheatsheets – quick technical or mental references
Vaults+++
Vaults.Vaults are the expansion pack of ±PEAKER. They’re not part of the core method, but they emerge naturally when parts of your system outgrow everything else. That is, you don’t plan for Vaults. You grow into them. And when that happens, your setup shifts into a new mode: ±PEAKER-V.
At their core, Vaults are self-contained spaces — their own instance of your second brain. You create one when something becomes big, sensitive, or distinct enough to deserve its own world, or when a cross-cutting concern defies the rest of your ±PEAKER structure. For example, if you need a clean line between personal and professional life, you might spin up a Vault for your corporate work. If you have a multi-year initiative or a product-bound knowledge base, you can create Vaults to hold them.
I currently maintain three such Vaults:
CODE – A structured software engineering knowledge base I might one day publish as a standalone product
<WorkClientName> – My main professional client app project.
FractalProductivity – Everything related to this Substack and my book
These aren’t just folders. They’re boundaries. Vaults give structure room to breathe. You’ll know it’s time for a Vault when a cluster of notes gets lots of inbound links but rarely links back. In other words, the rest of the system depends on it, but it stands apart. That’s your signal: it wants its own space.
Importantly, Vaults aren’t for everything. If you overuse them, the system fragments. But when used sparingly — and only when truly earned — Vaults prevent bloat. They let PEAKER scale with grace.
Running in ±PEAKER-V mode leaves you with an eight-space core, plus this ninth layer for major clusters. This doesn’t just add more storage. It gives you structural evolution. You can nest spaces, split off branches, and let parts decay without dragging everything else down.
Vaults remind us: a second brain is a living thing. It grows and shifts. Every few months, like a climber at base camp, you pause and reorient. What’s active? What’s dormant? What needs its own terrain? That’s the real power of Vaults. They aren’t a dumping ground — they’re a reflection of scale, integrity, and momentum. They show that your system isn’t rigid. It’s responsive — able to stretch when you do.
Conclusion
In 1945, when Vannevar Bush envisioned a desk-like machine that could become a true thinking partner, the technology wasn’t ready. Eighty years later, we finally have the means to build it. The problem isn’t technical anymore—it’s how we choose to engage with the technology we already have.
A critical part of that is how we organize our digital assets. In my analysis, digital organization has progressed through three major ages:
Age 1 was about storage — just finding things again.
Age 2 focused on shipping — organizing for output.
Age 3 shifted inward — reflecting, connecting, circling meaning.
Each solved a problem. Each created a new one.
Now, we’re entering Age 4 — and ±PEAKER is one of the first methods designed for it.
In ±PEAKER-V, you store your overall direction in Protocols, your active work in Efforts, your supportive knowledge in The Exclave, and your growing ideas in The Keep, where structure is earned, not imposed. You make your aspirational roles visible in The Arcade, protect inanimate info in Records, and let your system evolve and grow naturally through Vaults. And with the simple rhythm of Inbox (⁺) and Outbox (⁻), flow stays alive.
This structure isn’t a compromise—it’s a necessity. As we’ve seen with PARA and ACEx, the way we manage our digital artifacts shapes not just retrieval speed, output, and sense-making, but our experience of growth itself. In my view, ACEx has so far come closer than anything to Bush’s vision of a sense-making companion. But in doing so, it lost some of the productivity potency of PARA. And neither PARA nor ACEx truly concerns itself with protocols or roles. Both also left records behind.
±PEAKER does all of that—and more. It provides a solid foundation for creating a genuine personal knowledge companion. One that can be a coach, an anchor, and a mirror—a system that helps you stay clear, deliberate, and alive to what matters most.
±PEAKER sets a baseline rhythm for personal growth, balancing outer contribution and inner integration. We don’t just produce. We reflect. We don’t just circle. We build. We move between action and alignment—folding what we learn into who we are.
And it’s not about any single philosophy. It’s about living yours, clearly and intentionally. ±PEAKER simplifies. It reduces guesswork. It resists rigid categories while letting clarity emerge naturally.
Advances in AI will demand a wealth of personal knowledge to draw from. With ±PEAKER, you can grow that goldmine in a structured yet unconfined way. Unlike other methods, ±PEAKER can grow with you. It adapts. It deepens. It clarifies. And over time, it becomes a reflection of who you’re becoming, not just what you’re doing.
If you have any questions about ±PEAKER, please comment below. I aim to continually improve this essay to reach an increasing number of people who may benefit from it.
And if you’d like to dive deeper, make sure to get my book Scale-Smart, where I explore the method in more detail and situate it within my broader Scale-Smart Productiveness Framework.
“Stigmergy” usually is about how groups coordinate by leaving traces in their environment (see Parunak, H. Van Dyke. A Survey of Environments and Mechanisms for Human-Human Stigmergy, Springer, 2005). Here, I’m using it as a loose analogy for how we use spatial layouts—like folders or file paths—to find our way back to things. Research in human-computer interaction and cognitive science (e.g., Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild and Kirsh’s The Intelligent Use of Space) shows that arranging information outside our heads helps reduce mental effort and supports memory. In this context, Barreau and Nardi (1995) noted how users often preferred visible file hierarchies over search because they served as reminders and cues for action. Later work (Jones & Teevan, 2007; Whittaker, 2011) confirmed that spatial organization and careful foldering were central strategies for managing digital information overload at the time.
On the topic of the impossibility of perfect categorization, see Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press, 1999.