Prep Work Makes the Dish Work

Hi.

Last week in Making Fruit I shared with you that I signed up for Building A Second Brain, motivated by parts of Ultralearning and Rebbe. Those parts, for me, condense down into this principle:

Learning is teaching is living.

This week we’re learning to organize using PARA.

What is PARA?

PARA is a framework that stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives. Here are some working definitions:

• Projects are a sequence of tasks leading to a clear outcome and due date.

• Areas are active parts of your life

• Resources are topics of interest.

• Archives keep inactive items.

Why use PARA?

Moving from reading a book to taking action requires intention. Learning, to teach, requires consistent decision-making around what to capture, organize and share.

How?

In tools like Evernote, PARA are notebook stacks. On Google Drive and my computer, they are folders. In Roam, they are nodes in an ever-expanding knowledge network. In Things 3, they live as tasks.

Decision-making in PARA relies on a spectrum of actionability. Projects are more actionable, archives are less. Information transitions from less actionable to more actionable as needed. It’s not a one-and-done.

A good analogy to PARA is one that Tiago, the founder of Building A Second Brain, makes in referencing the book Work Clean. The book describes a system used to organize busy kitchens called mise-en-place. In French that’s to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking.

Cooking with PARA

Before firing up that cast-iron for a French omelet, you’ll need all the ingredients. Eggs. Milk. Kosher salt and cracked pepper. Unsalted butter.

You wouldn’t heat the pan and then go buy butter. You wouldn’t crack an egg and then start tracking down your vegetables. You would go hungry. 

Prep work makes the dish work.

Knowledge Work with PARA

The relevance to knowledge work is that, like cooking, it's best done with the prepped ingredients you need and none that you don’t. Relevant research boiled down. Quotes chopped and highlighted.

“Not so fast,” says my future mother-in-law in her charming Zimbabwean accent. “A cook has a recipe and a clear picture of the end product. Undertaking a project of any kind, we often lack that pathway. The intended outcome [in knowledge work] is often blurry at best. That’s why people get hung up on all the wrong things.”

Make it Clear

As my future mother-in-law mentions, when we don’t know what we’re cooking, it becomes easier to get obsessed with the right spatula than to figure out the recipe. That’s why it’s so important to get clear on the outcome. Don’t just say you’re cooking food, that’s too broad. Be honest and say you’re going to microwave a chicken sausage.

For knowledge work that lack of clarity often looks like tons of resources and very few projects. Instead, Tiago recommends breaking down projects into the smallest, clearest packets possible. If a project doesn’t have a clear outcome, it needs to be boiled down until it does.

The clearer the outcome, the more actionable it becomes.

How I’m Applying This

This weekly newsletter is a project that pushes me to spend 10-12 hours writing, getting feedback and editing. I go to bed thinking of the confusing paragraphs I’ve architected and I wake up with different solutions to try out.

I get so much more out of Building A Second Brain (area) because I’m constrained by a due-date and a committed outcome.

Projects give shape to your learning.

Crossing the Spectrum

What if there isn’t an obvious project yet?

I’m playing with Google Tilt Brush to sketch in VR. At the moment it’s an active interest—an area. I could create a project for myself (eg. sketching Jerry’s apartment from Seinfeld) but that could feel forced and end up backfiring. Instead, I can leave sketching in VR as an area, and catalogue my learning until the right project emerges.

In How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens shares that “the process of writing starts much, much earlier than that blank screen [the beginning of a project] and that the actual writing down of the argument [in a note] is the smallest part of its development.”

At the moment a project emerges for sketching in VR, I can rely on all the playful sketches I did early on. The bottom-up approach of PARA helps me feel supported and responsible for my learning not forced into an artificial structure.

But a note of caution…

Don’t Idolize the Spatula When You Want an Omelet

This whole post has been about how helpful I find PARA. But it would be easy to get lost in the nuances of the tools and process.

I’m reading a book on the constitution, OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? Does that belong in my areas of #reading or in my resources for #books? Should this course I’m taking be a project or an area? It has a due date, May 6, therefore it’s a project. But it’s also an active part of my life. It’s an area.

It's these organizational moments of crisis that feel like Yak Shaving. The lure of getting it right is both a "pointless activity but also necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.”

The right tool or way to organize may have an impact “several levels of recursion later,” but done now is better than perfect. As one of my cohort-mates puts it, “use whatever tools help you take action more effortlessly.”

Get it right just enough to move forward because it’s about the omelet not the spatula.

Takeaways

Projects give shape to your learning.

Make your projects small.

Catalogue your play and learning until a project emerges.

Stick to good enough when it comes to tools and organization.

Big thanks to the taste-testers who made this writing better with their thoughtful feedback: my fiancee, my future mother-in-law, and new friends on twitter: @rroudt, @celzalejandro, @_Reyesbp5, @mdtanos, @guiacarmona1.