AL #67: DPARA or How I Manage 10+ Projects with Just a Browser
The "DPARA" method.
For better or worse I've done a fair amount of work juggling in the past.
Whether leading several work streams with F500 companies at McKinsey on 2-3 month stints or more recently doing hiring, delivery and onboarding all at once to help Auditless scale throughout 2024.
There’s only so much force and effort you can apply to get things done in the short-term, but finding a breakthrough in process/tooling can pay dividends for many years.
I've tried all sorts of tracking techniques:
Building dashboards in spreadsheets;
Advanced note taking tools like Roam Research;
Databases in Notion (which are undoubtedly helpful for team collaboration).
But none have removed the stress and context-switching costs associated with working on multiple initiatives.
I used to have 50+ tabs open in Chrome full of things I thought I would get to (eventually).
Then came Arc and I closed all the tabs forever.
Enter the sidebar
I'm not going to pretend that you haven't heard about Arc (as a subscriber, chances are you are living in a similar internet bubble).
[ If you haven't, go try it here. ]
Arc’s key feature (despite all the recent explorations in AI) is still simply the ability to organize your tabs permanently on the left as if you were using a project management tool.
These tab groups exist in their own spaces.
For example, I have a single space for work, a second space for personal items and a third space that I use temporarily for screen recordings and screenshots.
Arc also clears tabs that haven't been used by more than 24 hours preventing the list of tabs from growing too large.
With Arc, I finally found the first half of my solution – most apps I interact with like Notion, Attio and Linear exist on the web so they can be saved as bookmarks in the sidebar.
The other half was missing, however.
I still didn't know how to organize the sidebar, my new digital domain.
Initially, I tried to create a new Arc space for each project. This simply resulted in too much context switching. I found myself going back and forth many times in a single day and some tabs like my time tracker or YouTube didn't have a clear home.
I also didn't know which links to group into folders resulting in so many pinned folders that I couldn't actually see my active tabs at all.
Had I replaced one problem (50+ tabs open) with another (too many pinned tabs)?
A detour through note taking
In parallel to my explorations in project management, I was also reevaluating my (non-existent) note taking stack.
I very quickly stumbled across the PARA method as advocated by Tiago Forte.
PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives and basically recommends a default folder structure should be across all your tools.
It’s a system that is organized for taking action.
Projects provide quick access to ongoing initiatives, allowing you to tap into reference material and quickly take the next step;
Areas contain long-standing trackers (like invoices);
Resources contain just that – your knowledge base. For comparison, most note-taking systems only focus on this aspect;
Archive is your digital trash bin. It contains notes related to completed projects, areas that are no longer relevant and even resources that you likely won't get to use again (perhaps related to an abandoned hobby or interest).
Tiago Forte’s Apple Notes video may be one of the most impactful YouTube videos I’ll ever see.
Here it is:
I used to think that I need a fancy note taking system to get anything done.
Or that I needed to be doing “digital gardening” and regularly going through my notes, reorganizing them and writing summaries.
But we live in a very different world now.
Two principles make digital gardening irrelevant:
You should be posting everything. If you are making a concerted effort in editing and reorganizing your writing, how far is it from something that is worth posting on a blog or social media account? Probably not that far. Just do it. Hesitant? You should learn to value distribution.
We will use AI to search our notes. There is no point in adding categories, tags and other organizational structures. AI search will be far better and more efficient than our manual organizational practices. It’s probably a year or two away from being a non-issue and many tools (like Notion) are already getting good at this.
So I moved my whole note taking system to Apple Notes and PARA.
Tiago talks about using PARA in your notes app and also to organize files locally and in the cloud.
I took this a step further and set up PARA as my default folder structure in Arc. These are all the folders I use:
Technically, I used a modified version I call DPARA which also includes a folder for dashboards.
Dashboards contain trackers like my Attio client pipeline, an Easel to track our social media statistics and more. These wouldn't be relevant in note-taking apps because note-taking apps rarely provide good dashboard functionality (although Notion is now working on charts).
This was the big unlock.
And it didn't stop there.
Making Slack bearable
Slack had gotten really overwhelming for me.
I have lots of DM groups across different client projects with diverging contexts and goals.
Slack’s Sections solve this.
It allows grouping channels together.
What better way to do it then grouping by Projects and Areas?
[ Note: very few Slack conversations would fall into the Resources folder and conversations that are closed are automatically “archived”. ]
Sections are only available in Slack’s paid plans but those are exactly the Slack spaces where you will run into the problem of maintainability. So go and use them!
This may feel really abstract and almost miniscule.
In fact I'm recommending very simple changes.
But changes like this can have a lot of impact.
I've already been sharing these ideas with a few people close to me because I feel like they are not necessarily obvious ways of leveraging a browser and a chat tool.
I hope you find them useful in simplifying your own life.