The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information #article - “Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. One that supported and enhanced the work you do, telling you exactly where to put a piece of information, and exactly where to find it when you needed it.”
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I don’t know what the comment policy is on your microblog, but both @dehowell and I have taken classes from Tiago. I really liked Building a Second Brain.
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This is really interesting and very timely for me. One of my tasks that I’m working on for Proj240 is to put GTD into full effect, and this issue has kind of been a stumbling block for me:
One thing that annoys me is that Tiago doesn’t give any credit to David Allen or his book and system Getting Things Done, when this PARA system is in large part based on GTD - you could even see it as a summary or reformulation of GTD. A lot of the ideas in that essay are taken directly from GTD, even in almost the same language, to the point where I would consider large parts of that link to be plagiarism.
There are also parts that could also be seen as a refinement of GTD regarding projects vs areas of responsibility.
The marketing also strikes me as very sleazy, so I will not be giving this guy my email address or any money.
But in any case, reading this link and thinking about this distinction was incredibly helpful for me - this is exactly what was tripping me up in terms of implementing GTD.
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All comments welcome! 
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I’m also allergic to this kind of “pay to read my content” framework. I enjoyed the article, but left his site the second I hit the paywall.
Wow. I really liked Tiago’s article, but had no idea about this. Added to the marketing sleaze, that drops him off my useful-source-of-info radar. A shame.
(@narthur, thanks all the same for the link! I loved reading this article.)
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I don’t know… To play devil’s advocate, if someone makes great content, I don’t really have a problem with them charging for it. And, to be fair, the PARA model has become basically ubiquitous at this point, and I’m not convinced it didn’t predate GTD, though I don’t have proof either way.
Yikes! That is a big miss. This post really should have explicitly cited GTD. I’m not defending the lack of citation, but I want to speak on Tiago’s behalf more generally. In several other contexts, I’ve seen him give credit to David Allen (definitely in the Building a Second Brain course material) and he often explicitly pitches PARA as some guidance on how to implement the “reference system” component of GTD. So he is not generally trying to take credit for Allen’s ideas, even if it seemed that way from this post.
I’m not trying to talk anyone out of their feelings about paywalled content or Tiago’s marketing style, but Building a Second Brain was incredibly valuable for me. I took the class in 2017 and have been using the methods since then. PARA is just one part of the overall system. BASB really does go well above-and-beyond stock GTD and has made a huge difference in how much value I get out of my notes and reading.
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Seconding dehowell. Tiago does talk about David Allen and GTD explicitly by name all the time, so I promise he is not trying to wholesale plagiarise, but that doesn’t mean that any one article couldn’t be clearer.
He would love the feedback about the article, I promise!
The value of his thinking and ideas has outweighed the slightly-offputting marketing polish, for me.
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One more note on Tiago Forte and GTD, David Allen has a testimonial on his “Building a Second Brain” course page.
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