Today I want to show you how to apply the PARA method in your Obsidian Vault.

But, what is PARA? PARA is a simple and powerful method created by Tiago Forte, that helps people to organize their lives by dividing the system in four top-level categories.

PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.

• Projects: things you are actively working on with a goal and deadline. For example: - Finish a website. - Write an article. - Prepare a presentation.
• Areas: important aspects of your private and working life that require constant attention. For example: - Society. - Marketing. - Home. - Kids.
• Resources: things you are interested in and that can be helpful for your active projects and areas. For example: - Productivity. - Notetaking. - Artificial Intelligence.
• Archives: things that come from the other three categories and that you no longer need but prefer to save for possible future reference. For example: - Completed projects. - Areas no longer relevant. - Resources you are no longer interested in.

Now that you know the base of what the PARA method is, let's see how we can put it into practice with Obsidian.

But first of all, we need to install three plugins:

• Templater: it helps us to manage the templates with some nice features thanks to some functions that we will write with a templating language.
• Projects: to manage views for our projects and areas (board, calendar and gallery).
• Dataview: for data queries.

Finally, let's dive into it!

Vault Structure

Let's start by creating the following folders:

• 01 — Projects
• 02 — Areas
• 03 — Resources
• 04 — Archives

01 — Projects

Inside this folder, I put a single note for each active project I have.

Areas

I personally have only two sub-folders here called Journal→Daily that contain my daily notes; the rest of the files are just notes.

As you can see, some notes begin with "00 — ": these notes represent the main areas, and inside each main area note I use the Dataview plugin to write three queries to group up notes related to that specific area. The first dataview query is to group up the notes that are active projects inside 01 — Projects folder (Work In Progress projects); the second is to group up the notes that are still in my 02 — Areas folder because I need to constantly review and update them; and the third query is to group up the archived notes inside 04 — Archives.

The data queries look like these:

03 — Resources

In this folder I simply divide subjects by creating sub-folders. I also have some "permanent" sub-folders in here:

• The Attachments folder where the attachment files (images, pdf…) are saved in my vault.
• The Books folder where I put books that I've read, I'm reading or I want to read — For your information, I wrote an article about how I manage books: Obsidian Library.
• The Readwise folder where I find every highlight I do on my kindle, newsletters, podcasts, tweets, articles, etc. thanks to the sync between my Obsidian vault and Readwise.

04 — Archives

I put in this last folder all the things that come from the other three categories and that I no longer need but prefer to save for possible future reference. There can be both sub-folders and single notes.

Templates

Now that we've prepared the vault, I will show you the structure of my Projects and Areas templates, but I will not show you any Resources template because it totally depends on your needs. Regarding the Archives section, there is no template since it's just a place where you put notes that already exist and that already have their template.

Projects Template

Let's start from the complex one; this is the template structure:

In this example you see my tags, Area, status, priority, scheduled and due options but obviously you can change them as you want. Here's the block:

<%"---"%>
created: <% tp.file.creation_date('DD-MM-YYYY' + ' ' + 'HH:mm') %>
tags: <% await tp.system.suggester(["Project", "Project, APOI", "Project, Medium", "Project, MSC", "Project, Personal", "Project, SKD", "Project, Video"], ["Project", "Project, APOI", "Project, Medium", "Project, MSC", "Project, Personal", "Project, SKD", "Project, Video"]) %>
Area: <% await tp.system.suggester(["[[00 - APOI]]", "[[00 - Medium]]", "[[00 - Mind Stone Consulting]]", "[[00 - Personal]]", "[[00 - SKD Guild]]", "[[00 - Youtube]]"], ["[[00 - APOI]]", "[[00 - Medium]]", "[[00 - Mind Stone Consulting]]", "[[00 - Personal]]", "[[00 - SKD Guild]]", "[[00 - Youtube]]"]) %>
status: <% await tp.system.suggester(["Inbox", "Planned", "In Progress", "Done"], ["Inbox", "Planned", "In Progress", "Done"]) %>
priority: <% await tp.system.suggester(["Low", "Medium", "High"], ["Low", "Medium", "High"]) %>
scheduled: <% await tp.system.prompt("Enter the scheduled date") %>
due: <% await tp.system.prompt("Enter the due date") %>
<%"---"%>
# <% tp.file.title %>
> [!tip]- References
> <% tp.file.cursor() %>

• tags property helps me to group up notes by using dataview queries and to easily search them in my vault.
• Area is the property where I store the link to the main area note that the project refer to, so I can open it directly from the project note.
• status property is for the Projects plugin board view (Kanban). In my case, this property will divide my board view in four different categories.
• priority helps me to identify how much important the project is.
• scheduled is the property where I set the scheduled date.
• due is the deadline.

It looks a bit complicated but it's not! Basically the tp.system.suggester spawns a suggester prompt with the options that you declared and returns your chosen item, and the tp.system.prompt spawns a prompt modal and returns your input. Don't worry, you will see how it works in the video example at the end of this article!

After the frontmatter section there is a callout called References where I put inside the links to the notes that the project can refer to (from Resources folder most likely).

Areas Template

This is a very basic template for the main areas notes.

Here's the block:

<%"---"%>
created: <% tp.file.creation_date('DD-MM-YYYY' + ' ' + 'HH:mm') %>
tags: Area
cover:
<%"---"%>
# <% tp.file.title %>

I use the cover property to store a link to an image for the Projects plugin gallery view that we will see later.

Projects Plugin

If you've read my Obsidian Library article, you are already familiar with this plugin, but if this is the first time that you hear about this, I suggest you to read that article where I explain how to create new projects and views in Projects plugin.

This time we will create two different sections in Projects plugin called Projects and Areas, and we will use three different views: Board and Calendar views for the Projects and Gallery view for the Areas. Let's dive into this!

Board View

Earlier, we've added a status property in the project template with these values: Inbox, Planned, In Progress, Done. Using the board view (kanban) in the Projects section, and that property as Status option, we can have an instant look at the projects that are in our Inbox, the projects that we've Planned, the projects that are In Progress and the project that we've Done.

You can include the fields that you want inside the cards and, as you can see in the screenshot above, I decided to show the Area, to have a direct link to the main area note, the priority and the scheduled and due dates.

Calendar View

This is another useful view in the Projects section that helps me to see when I have to start a project or a part of it. The calendar view take the scheduled date property to show the notes in the calendar.

Gallery View

This is the only view I use in the Areas section, the gallery view. Here I can simply see and navigate to my main areas notes.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I've used the cover property as Cover option to show an image for each main area.

The Process

We've seen A LOT of things but now it's time to put all of this into practice and I think that the best way to do that is to write down the steps you need to do and share with you a short video where you can actually see this process.

1. Create a new project note and give it a title.
2. Apply the project template to the note.
3. Set up all the properties one by one.
4. Open the Projects plugin and look at your new project in the Board and Calendar view to check if it's everything ok.

The video example:

Conclusion

This is how I've implemented the PARA method in Obsidian and I think this is another great example on how much helpful Projects plugin can be. You can have almost everything under control directly from there!

In this article we went through many things and for someone it can looks complicated, but it's not; once you set it up, it's really easy and satisfying. And if you want more information or help about anything just let me know in the comment section.

You can also follow me on YouTube for more Obsidian related content!