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P.A.R.A. and Zettelkasten Experiment: My Conclusion

·2 mins
PARA Zettelkasten notetaking

At the beginning of my experiment I intended to write regular updates on what I was getting up to, however I haven’t really done that.

If I had been doing that, here are a few things I retrospectively imagine I would have written about:

  • introducing a Task Management element to accompany the P of PARA
  • migrating to Obsidian and introducing Markor and using it’s QuickNote feature
    • (leading on to “My QuickNote Problem” aka my latest manifestation of Collector’s Fallacy)
  • trying out Daily Notes and habit tracking
  • thinking more deliberately about the type of note I’m taking
  • experimenting with how I use tags
  • starting to create MOCs

I have plenty of rambles and reflections on all of these things in my notes but I haven’t quite nailed down the habit of publishing any of it…

My latest effort on this front is this – aka trying to write an “Atomic Essay” or at least a short blog post. This started as a (much) longer draft back in January and during a handful of re-reads between then and now I just thought “I should write a shorter version of this” then continued putting it off. But not anymore! I’ve written a shorter reflection and this is it.

Anyway, back to the point. The P.A.R.A. Zettelkasten Experiment.

I am going to conclude my series on this experiment. That doesn’t mean I won’t write about it at all anymore, but it does mean I’ll stop calling it an experiment. It’s just how my notetaking system is set up now.

Can the R of my P.A.R.A. be my Zettelkasten?

Yes. Yes it can.

There is an endless variety of ways you can set up, divide, configure, operate, automate, change and use your personal notetaking system.

The most important one though, is to use your system. Try not to get caught up in adjusting things and making tweaks continually – make changes, but then live with them for a while. See if they really work for you. That applies to the more creative notes as much as it does the systematic ones.

Keeping “zettels” in the same folder as miscellaneous “resources” works fine for me. It might not work for you. That’s fine though. It’s a personal notetaking system, so figure out what works for you.

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