The PARA Method,
Finally Built Right.
You've read Building a Second Brain. You know Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives should be the backbone of your knowledge system. But no tool actually built it that way — until now.
What Is the PARA Method?
The PARA method is a universal organization system created by productivity expert Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain. PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives — four categories that organize every type of information in your life by actionability rather than topic.
Projects are short-term efforts with a clear goal and deadline. Areas are ongoing responsibilities with standards to maintain. Resources are topics of ongoing interest for future reference. Archives hold inactive items from the other three categories.
It's simple, universal, and it works because it mirrors how your brain naturally categorizes — by actionability, not by topic. The problem was never the method. The problem was that no tool actually implemented it — not Notion, not Obsidian, not NotebookLM.
Four Categories. One System.
Zero Manual Work.
Other tools make you build PARA yourself with folders and tags. We built it into the foundation — with AI handling the heavy lifting.
Projects
Short-term efforts with a finish line
Every project has a goal, a deadline, and a clear definition of done. Track what’s active, spot what’s overdue, and archive what’s complete — all from a single dashboard that keeps you honest.
- Title, emoji, description, goal, start date, and due date
- Full lifecycle: Active → Completed → Cancelled → Archived
- Filter by status and Smart Tags (hashtags)
- Grid and list view toggle
- Overdue and due-soon alerts surfaced to your dashboard
Areas
Ongoing responsibilities you maintain
Areas don’t have a finish line — they have standards. Set review cadences and get automatic reminders when it’s time to check in. This is Forte’s key insight about areas of responsibility, finally automated.
- Review cadence system: weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly
- "Mark as Reviewed" button with automatic timestamps
- Overdue-review detection with dashboard alerts
- Full CRUD, tagging, and filtering — same as Projects
- No more forgetting to review what matters
Resources
Topics of ongoing interest
Reference material you’ll come back to. Research, inspiration, techniques, tools — organized by topic and cross-linked to your projects, pages, and AI conversations.
- Collect reference material for any topic
- Cross-linked to Pages, Files, and AI Chats
- Full folder organization and tagging
- Semantic search across all your resources
- Add resources to any Project or Area
Archives
The inactive holding zone
Completed projects, paused areas, outdated resources — everything lands here. Nothing is ever lost. One click brings anything back to active when you need it.
- Unified archive across Projects, Areas, and Resources
- Items move here on completion or cancellation
- One-click restore to active status
- Full search across all archived content
- Everything preserved, always retrievable
A Dashboard That
Actually Keeps You on Track
See everything at a glance. What's overdue, what needs review, what you touched last. Your entire PARA system, one screen.
Live PARA Counts
See totals across all four categories at a glance
Brain Chat
Talk to your entire knowledge base with one prompt
Activity Feed
Your last 6 touched items with deep links to each
Favorite Problems
Quick access to your 12 open questions
Review Reminders
Areas overdue for review, highlighted automatically
Knowledge Counter
Total items across your entire Second Brain
Every PARA Item Is a
Living Workspace
This isn't a folder with files in it. Every project, area, and resource is a full workspace — nested folders, rich notes, file uploads, AI chat scoped to that item, and more.
Nested Folders
Breadcrumb navigation with drag-and-drop
Add Pages
Rich TipTap notes linked to the item
Add Files
PDFs, URLs, YouTube, GitHub, audio, images, and more
Chat with Project
AI scoped to everything inside the item
Smart Tags
Hashtags for cross-PARA organization
Pin Items
Pin what matters most to the top
Bulk Chat
Select multiple items, chat with all of them
Real-time Sync
Every change, every device, instantly
12 Favorite Problems
Richard Feynman kept a list of his most important open questions and tested everything he learned against them. Tiago Forte made it a core second brain practice. We made it intelligent.
Write your biggest questions. Let AI find the answers.
Maintain up to 12 open questions — the problems that matter most to you. With one click, AI searches your entire knowledge base, streams its thinking in real-time, matches documents with relevance scores, and generates a summary from your own saved content. Results persist and compound as your library grows.
Full Knowledge Search
Searches every document, page, and file in your library
Visible Reasoning
Watch AI think step-by-step as it works through your content
Relevance Scoring
Documents ranked by similarity so the best matches surface first
Persistent Results
Summaries saved permanently — revisit and build on them
Capture. Organize. Distill. Express.
PARA organizes your knowledge. CODE puts it to work. Forte's complete workflow — with AI handling the steps that used to take hours.
Capture
Save anything — TikToks, articles, PDFs, podcasts, YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts — with one click. The Chrome Extension captures web content as you browse. Every AI conversation can be saved to Pages.
- Chrome Extension for web capture
- Pages for rich notes
- 20+ supported content types
- One-click save from AI chat
Organize
Content flows into your PARA system. Smart Tags are generated automatically. Everything is categorized, connected, and placed where it belongs — no manual sorting required.
- PARA classification
- Auto-generated Smart Tags
- Connected to related content
- Zero manual work
Distill
AI processes every piece of content into searchable, understandable knowledge. Documents are chunked, vector-embedded, and summarized. The meaning is extracted — not just the text.
- AI-powered summarization
- Vector embeddings for semantic search
- Progressive distillation
- Meaning extraction across formats
Express
Chat with your knowledge base. Build on Visual Boards. Write on Pages. Share with public links. Your captured knowledge becomes active output — insights you can use and share.
- Brain Chat — talk to everything
- Visual AI Boards
- Rich Pages editor
- Public sharing links
If you've read Building a Second Brain, you already know the method works. You've just never had a tool that did it justice. No more Notion templates. No more Obsidian plugins. No more building PARA from scratch. See pricing.
Stop Searching.
Start Knowing.
Everything you save. Instantly organized. Always findable. This is the second brain you've been looking for.
Start Your Second Brain