OneNote has been my dumping ground for 15 years now, it’s a chaotic mess, because I’ve been lazy and search works really well.

Today I have a few notebooks, some for actual, organized work, and some for the grandiose ideas I get, or the random stuff I find.

I recently started a new notebook using the PARA model:

Projects

Areas of Responsibility

Resources

Archive

(And an additional section which I added to the model)

Reference

I added this to PARA, I find it useful for some resources to be in a separate Reference section, since Resources gets archived upon completion of a Project or Area of Responsibility.

So in addition to my other notebooks, I have this PARA one at the top, with these four elements as Section Groups (Sections Groups Are Sections that can contain other sections, kind of like major tabs in a notebook, that can have smaller tabs in them). I largely work out of it every day, using other notebooks to capture all the random stuff that catches my eye.

Every Project/Responsibility/related Resource is added to that notebook. Other stuff (random articles, curiosities, etc) go elsewhere. This notebook is specifically for actionable, actually important, life management stuff.

Everything flows from the Project Section and the Areas of Responsibility Section. Resources never exist on their own - they are always related to either a Project or an Area of Responsibility (I even name the Sections in Resources the same as their related Project or Responsibility so it’s clear they go together).

Just last week I archived my first project, including it’s related Resource section - what a great feeling!