Team Knowledge Management: How to Use PARA in Your Organization

However, if you want to share those book notes with even one other person, suddenly the whole situation changes. There is a chasm that separates any two minds. You have no idea what the other person knows, remembers, or understands. You now have to add a considerable amount of context and structure to make sure they have a shot at understanding what your notes contain.

Adding context and creating structure – including steps like defining your terms, making your assumptions explicit, or bridging the logic from one point to another, among many others – are cognitively expensive. And every minute you spend adding formality and structure to a document is a minute you’re not spending moving your team’s projects and goals forward.

I recommend advising your staff to keep all their notes, files, and documents in their own individual PARA folders by default. That way they can remain informal and messy until the moment more formality is needed. 

Only when a project or area becomes collaborative, with multiple people involved, should it be moved to shared Projects or Areas folders. If you think about the totality of all the work the entire team takes on, most of it will be at the individual level. Thus only a minority of the organization’s overall workload should reside in the shared PARA system.

I often see organizations default to a high level of formality in all their communication. For example, a complex feedback form with 12 required fields, a memo template that reads like a government decree, or a company wiki with 10 levels of hierarchy requiring you to find the exact place something belongs.

Defaulting to overly elaborate information-sharing is a constant temptation inside organizations because it feels like the right thing to do.

every bit of formality carries a hidden cost. It extracts a toll on people’s time and energy that will inevitably show up in the form of frustration, discouragement, and a sense of defeat

When you force people to follow elaborate rules whose purpose they don’t understand, you are robbing them of the enthusiasm and excitement they need to do their most creative, inspired work

One thing you’ll quickly discover when it comes to Knowledge Management is that it is essentially a form of communication. 

A document, note, or other digital asset is a message being communicated through time. When it comes to team knowledge management, the quality of that communication becomes even more important, since you don’t know who exactly will be receiving it on the other end

It turns out that effective knowledge management within an organization essentially boils down to how well people write down what they know, and share or otherwise express it in a form that other people benefit from.

Writing is the individual skill most relevant to Knowledge Management, and the fact that most people don’t write particularly well or often indicates why KM is also lacking in most organizations. To put it simply: the only way to share knowledge effectively is to create a culture of writing within your team.