The PARA method without building the folders first.

The PARA method is a good idea that most people never finish setting up. If you want PARA without building the folders first, Remlo gets you most of the way.

Tiago Forte’s system sorts everything into four buckets. Projects are efforts with an end, like a website or a bathroom renovation. Areas are responsibilities that never end, like health or money. Resources are reference material on things you care about. Archives hold whatever has gone inactive from the other three.

It is a clean model. I have used it, and I think it is right about one thing in particular: you should file things when you work on them, not in a separate sorting session.

Where it stalls in a notes app

You open Obsidian, Notion, or Apple Notes. The first job is four folders.

Then the questions start. Is the book I am reading a resource or part of a project? Is “taxes” an area or a project that repeats every year? The answers matter less than how long you spend on them, and you spend that time before you have written a single note you need.

Once the tree exists, every capture asks where it goes. A note typed on the phone in a lift gets dropped in the inbox, and the inbox is where PARA notes wait to be filed. The inbox fills up. The thing you were trying to avoid, a pile you have to sort later, has a new name.

What the same four ideas look like in Remlo

Remlo has no folders. It creates a page for every day, and you write there first.

When a line belongs to something, you name the thing and make it a link. A project, an area, a book, a person: each is a page, and the link is how you reach it.

Links point both ways. Write “call the roofer” on Tuesday, link the Halden rebuild, and the Halden page now lists Tuesday. Every day that named it is there, in date order, with the lines you wrote and the to-dos you typed.

That covers three of the four buckets without a single drag. A project is a page with an end date in your head. An area is a page that never gets one. A resource is a page you link to from whatever you are working on.

Archive is the one that disappears. A finished project page sits where it was and stops collecting new links. Nothing moves, so nothing breaks.

Why filing by link holds up

A folder answers one question: where does this live? A note can live in one place, so a meeting that covers two projects gets filed under one and goes missing from the other.

A link answers a different question: what did this touch? The same line can link both projects and show up on both pages. I stopped losing meeting notes the week I stopped deciding which project they belonged to.

It also fits Tiago’s own rule. You organize while you work, and the work here is writing. The link is the filing, and it happens in the same keystrokes.

What you give up

A visible tree. If you like opening a sidebar and seeing four boxes with your whole life inside, Remlo will feel bare. Pages are reachable by search, by link, and from the day they were written, and there is no hierarchy to browse.

Templates for PARA. Obsidian has people who share whole vaults set up for it, and Notion has a template for every variation. Remlo has none.

Tags and properties for filtering. Search reads inside notes, and links do the grouping.

A week of it

Monday: you write on today’s page. Two lines about the roof, a to-do to call the roofer, a book title someone mentioned. You link the roof job while typing.

Wednesday: a meeting touches the roof and the budget. You link both. The to-do from Monday sits on the To-dos page with the rest, and ticking it anywhere moves it to Done on the board.

Friday: you open the roof page. It lists Monday and Wednesday. You wrote no summary and moved no file.

That is the method, minus the setup. If you want the longer version of this argument, the second brain page has it.

Remlo is native on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, works offline, and syncs through your iCloud. It is $19 a year with seven days free, or $149 once.

I kept the part of PARA that says organize while you work, and I dropped the folders.