The PARA method is elegant. Four categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Tiago Forte spent years distilling the idea that your note system should be organized by actionability, not topic. It works.

Up to a point.

The Problem I Took Time to Name

After two years with PARA, I started noticing that I found things by memory, not by the system. If I needed a note about a client, I remembered it was in Projects/client-name. If I needed research about a framework, I remembered it was in Resources/programming.

The system was serving me less than my memory. That’s a sign of a problem.

The problem became clear when I started using AI agents to work with my notes. The agent needed to understand the context of each entity — who the client is, what the project is about, what has already been decided — to be useful. With PARA, that context was scattered. A project folder had meeting notes and tasks. Resources had related research. Areas had strategic considerations. Three places for one thing.

The Entity-First Turn

The reorganization I did was simple in concept, tedious in execution: I stopped organizing by note type and started organizing by entity.

Each client has a folder. Each product I’m building has a folder. Each area of study has a folder. Inside each folder, whatever exists: meeting notes, research, contracts, decisions, tasks, ideas.

The structure inside each entity is by content type, not actionability. comms/ for communications, specs/ for technical specifications, research/ for research, contracts/ for contracts.

What Changed

Two things improved immediately.

First: cohesive context. When I open a client’s folder, everything related to them is there. I don’t need to remember which Tiago Forte category that note would go in.

Second: better for AI agents. When I give an agent context about a project, I can point to a folder and say “this is client X.” The agent reads everything and has complete context. With PARA, I had to manually assemble the context.

What PARA Still Does Well

PARA isn’t wrong — it’s an answer to a different problem. If you have personal notes, journaling, random ideas, books, general references, PARA is great for deciding where each thing goes.

What I discovered is that for professional work — where entities are concrete and context matters — entity-first organization works better.

The Lesson

Organization systems aren’t universal truths. They’re tools. The question isn’t “what’s the best system?” — it’s “what problem does this system solve for me today?”

And that question changes as you and your work change.