Jana's chocolates are only a project during Advent

Jana makes chocolates once a year. For the rest of the year, what she knows about chocolate fillings sits in a folder called Resources. At the end of November production starts, and the material becomes an active project. Once the chocolates have been sent out, she moves the folder back out of the way. She has no area of responsibility called “chocolate production”.

The subject stays the same throughout. All that changes is how active it is right now. That is exactly what the PARA method sorts by, and in doing so it answers a question I have been hearing constantly for years: where do you put all the stuff that needs no action?

Why the workflow diagram stops at “file it”

In GTD’s workflow diagram, reference material is dealt with quickly: no action, but still useful, so file it. That’s where the diagram ends, and I think that’s right. How you file lies beyond GTD’s natural system boundary.

The method isn’t entirely silent, though. It sets a bar: filing should take under a minute, and for general reference a single alphabetical filing system is enough. What the structure looks like once notes, cloud and hard drive come together and project material sits alongside contracts, it doesn’t say.

Companies like to fill this gap with effort. Two people design a folder structure that is supposed to still help you find things in a few years’ time, and everyone else has to stop and think about where each file belongs. Since 1998 I have watched filing systems like these die because nobody lives by them.

Tiago Forte, who came up with the PARA method, calls this a fundamental flaw in our thinking: we build filing systems for the moment of finding. But the price gets paid at the moment of filing. With my email, at a rough guess, for every one I look for there are a hundred I’ve filed. If you have to stop and think over each one, you pay a hundred times to save once.

Finding happens through search anyway, by name and by content. The folder makes filing quick and separates what you need right now from what’s over.

The file name comes before the folder

If search does the finding, it needs something to find. Three rules are enough for the name. It says what’s inside. It always follows the same pattern, whether that’s CamelCase, underscores or spaces. And it gets by with three terms.

2026-11-06 Invoice Telekom.pdf
Travel Insurance Agreement Electronic Communication.pdf

I put the date first because YYYY-MM-DD, sorted alphabetically, is also chronological. In five years’ time it won’t matter whether I search for invoice and Telekom or for Telekom and the date. “Electronic communication” is what it says on the document, and it’s what the helpline would call it too.

Spaces stopped being a technical problem long ago. Leave out asterisks, question marks and slashes: the Mac allows much of this, but by the time you reach a USB drive or a cloud sync, the errors start. Upper and lower case are a similar story: Ulrich had one drive that told them apart and one that didn’t, and got error messages. On a Mac, diskutil info / | grep Personality shows you where you stand: you are better off staying away from Case-sensitive APFS.

Renaming can be automated, for instance with Hazel on the Mac or File Juggler on Windows, which watch a folder. My invoices run fully automatically: invoice date from the PDF, the word invoice, supplier, product.

The PARA method and GTD side by side

PARA stands for four folders: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive. Mine go by their German names, Projekte, Bereiche, Ressourcen and Archiv, and there is also an inbox for whatever I scan on the road. When I first read about it, I thought: I know this already. Projects are projects, and areas are the areas of responsibility from the GTD horizons of focus.

Folder	What goes there	Link to GTD	Example
Projects	Material for an outcome you can tick off	project support material	receipts from a business trip
Areas	Material for a standard with no end date	areas of responsibility	current tenancy agreement
Resources	Knowledge with no obligation attached	general reference	recipes
Archive	What’s over but shouldn’t go just yet	no place of its own	completed projects

Paul Martin heard about PARA three or four times before it clicked. He was missing one thought: the four folders don’t depend on each other. Each thing sits in exactly one, and when it no longer fits there, it moves on.

For GTD, the first folder matters most. The project list names the desired outcome but leaves open where the material for it lives. A folder with exactly the project’s name answers that. It doesn’t have to be pretty inside: I scanned the receipts from my last business trip while still on the road and dropped them in there.

Even so, not everything will ever live in one place. For me, ideas and concepts are fluid and go into notes, while a signed contract is fixed and goes into the file system. Ulrich objected that this adds a search step. True, but it’s two places with the same structure instead of ten with ten different ones.

Three questions for the borderline cases

The rules are simple. Deciding what goes where isn’t, at first.

Project or area: when is it finished?

“I speak German” can never be ticked off. “I can do a hundred skips on the skipping rope without tripping” can. Exercise, on the other hand, has no end date, even if you eventually manage a thousand. The folder for a group I support every week sat under Projects for a long time, until I asked myself when that group was actually meant to be finished. For about six months now it has been under Areas.

Area or resource: are you answerable for it?

Jana and Jörg draw the line in a similar way: resources are interests, areas are obligations. If Jana ran her own confectioner’s, there would be an area for it, with a lease and staff. The recipes would still live in Resources.

Nicki got stuck on a software manual. Here your role decides: if you have to keep it up to date, you have an area. If you only use it, you have a resource. The same document sits in two different folders for two people, and both are right.

Resource or archive: could you find it online in five minutes?

This is the line Hendrik got stuck on. When you close a project, Forte’s question helps: what did I learn here that I couldn’t find online in five minutes? That goes into Resources. From a project called “I eat healthily”, what remains is a folder called “Cookbook”; the rest goes into the archive or straight in the bin.

I keep old tenancy agreements without being able to say why, but they have no business sitting next to the current one. For me the archive is the stage before the bin, with one exception: anything subject to a retention obligation stays until the period runs out.

Why AI needs this structure

Hendrik tells his AI, “Just muddle about in there, as long as you can find your way around”, and wonders whether that’s the future. At a meeting of IT companies recently, several of them said they let AI do all their filing. By now they no longer know where their data is.

If I give an AI 50 GB of jumbled data, it misses a lot or suddenly pulls information from one project into another. But if I say, “The folder is called Project UFO, all the plans and notes are in there, that’s where we’re working now”, it handles things completely differently. Ulrich adds that the longer it searches, the more tokens it costs, and without internet you can’t get at anything that only the AI can find again.

My AI knows my filing system and files the same way I do. Resources becomes a knowledge base along the way: I built myself an AI bot that may only answer from this folder, and it gives me back knowledge I had partly forgotten. Maybe all this will be unnecessary in a few years. I wouldn’t build my filing on that today.

Switching over in four steps

Forte suggests not tidying up but starting afresh:

1. Create a folder called “Archive” with today’s date and move everything into it. Nothing is lost.
2. Create a folder for each active project and fetch what you need for it from the archive.
3. Group these folders under “Projects”. Next to it goes “Archive”, with your dated folder inside.
4. Create “Areas” and “Resources”. For most people, Resources stays empty for a while.

Expect a transition period: it took me a month or two before I no longer had to hunt for things. Since then, filing has been much easier.

Where it typically goes wrong

• Ongoing topics under Projects. Anything that never gets finished is in the wrong place there, and the folder no longer shows what you’re actually working on right now.
• No fixed moment for moving things. Finished projects stay where they are because nobody clears them away. In your weekly review, compare the folder with your project list: whatever’s ticked off moves on.
• Resources as a new topic tree. If you start nesting deeply again there, you’re back to thinking about every file. One folder per topic, alphabetical, is enough.
• Moving shared filing systems single-handedly. Shoving everything into the archive works for your own data. On a shared drive it breaks links and connections between files. A team has to agree on that first.

Common questions

How do the PARA method and GTD fit together?

GTD governs what to do with a thing, and the PARA method governs where the material for it lives. Project support material goes in the Projects folder, documents for areas of responsibility in Areas, general reference in Resources and anything completed in the Archive. The two don’t compete, because GTD doesn’t prescribe a folder structure.

What is the difference between Resources and the Archive?

Resources hold knowledge you want to use again, while the Archive holds completed material you are only keeping. When you finish a project, whatever you couldn’t find online in five minutes goes into Resources, and the rest goes into the Archive or the bin.

Where does the material from Someday/Maybe projects go?

The material goes into the Archive, because the project isn’t active right now. The entry on the Someday/Maybe list remains the reminder, and the archive folder is just where it’s stored. If the project becomes active, the folder moves back under Projects.

How do I name files so I can find them again?

Describe the content in three terms and stick to one pattern, for example “2026-11-06 Invoice Telekom”. A leading date in YYYY-MM-DD format sorts alphabetically and chronologically at once. Leave out asterisks, question marks and slashes, because they cause problems when syncing.

Do you still need a folder structure with AI?

Yes. As things stand today, a folder structure is actually especially important for AI. In a clearly defined project folder, an AI agent works more accurately and uses fewer tokens, whereas in an unsorted mountain of data it easily makes false connections. On top of that, you can then find your data without AI too.

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Keep a tally for a week: how often do you file something, and how often do you look for something? If your ratio looks anything like mine, you know which of the two moments your filing should be built for.

A filing system that follows three different logics across notes, cloud and drive won’t tidy itself up. In the Digital Workplace Audit we look at where your data lives today and what structure will hold up there. Write to me if you can no longer say, for yourself or your team, what belongs where.