Why I Organize Areas in PARA with a Taxonomy of Functional Areas

Note from Tiago: Timothy Kenny is the author of “Accelerated Learning for Entrepreneurs,” and is a top productivity instructor on Udemy with more than 87 productivity courses, 110,000+ students, and 5,000+ reviews. Watch our recent interview for a closer look at how our productivity systems can work together.

By Timothy Kenny

A student of mine recently enrolled in Tiago’s Building a Second Brain course, and asked me how he could integrate certain parts of my organization system, which uses “functional areas” to organize your personal information, with the PARA system taught by Tiago.

Areas in PARA are the places where you keep track of all your information related to the permanent responsibilities you have in your life. They help you organize the different types of activities you do throughout your days, weeks, months and years.

Areas can also be linked to the roles you play in your life. Each role you have in your life comes with responsibilities. For each area you have, there is a role you play. Just to keep your life running smoothly, you have to switch between dozens of different roles throughout the course of a week or month.

To do this effectively, you need to have Areas set up in your PARA system that match up to each of these roles.

Then, when you have a task or routine to do that is relevant to that role, you can jump into your PARA system in Evernote, Notion or some other app and quickly find all your resources related to that Area.

For example, say you are in your gardening role and you are ready to plant some tomatoes, but you forget how to do it. You can go into your “Gardening” area to find all your knowledge related to gardening. You can easily find things that you put into your Second Brain 5 or 10 years ago.

The question, then, is which Areas should you have in your PARA system?

In a new blog post I’ve written with Tiago’s help, I’ve detailed how to integrate my Taxonomy of Functional Areas with Tiago’s PARA system.

In the post, I give you my full taxonomy of over 100 functional areas, which I normally only offer in my paid courses, for free. I explain in detail how to implement this taxonomy within PARA so that you can apply it to whichever app(s) you are using. 

The taxonomy is both comprehensive (not leaving anything out) and has minimal overlap (so there aren’t 2 or 3 or more areas where something might be categorized).

I also share how to use my method of organizing learning projects within PARA.