What I'm doing now

My note-taking system is based on Tiago Fortes PARA method, which defines a projects as short-term efforts that you’re working on now. Which have:

1. A begining and an end.
2. A specific outcome to achieve.

I use the above a guideline, rather than a strict rule. To me, every ongoing personal workstream should be represted by a project. If some work includes multiple todos over a certain time period it is a project.

Here is the article I wrote about my setup.

Some of them might be in German. That is in the nature of how I set this up. Essentially, what you see here is directly pulled from my note-taking system and the titles first and foremost need to serve my organizational needs.

As the structure of the title, I have two kinds:

1. Reflective of the action performed by the project. Tiago recommends verbs that imply completion like “finalize”, “green-light”, “launch”, or “publish”.
2. Statement of what it is. “book: NAME” is a book I’m reading. I find this format easier to parse than “read NAME”. “taxes YEAR” is another example, where I prefer the simple statement over a “do taxes YEAR”.

I like the idea of the now page, but I don’t like maintaining one. Having a reminder in my calendar works, but was just annoying to do and I did not do it. With the current approach I simply give the reader the option to look into what I already do anyway: my project management. For me it only requires a tiny amount of extra work, which is even well integrated into my system. The simplicity means I will actually do it.