PARA in Orimora

PARA (by Tiago Forte) organizes knowledge by actionability, not by topic: every note lives in one of four buckets — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives — and moves between them as its relevance changes. It is a lightweight way to structure a workspace, and it maps cleanly onto Orimora.

The four categories

Category	Holds	Actionability
Projects	Efforts with a goal and an end date (“Launch v2”, “Hire a designer”)	Active, time-bound
Areas	Ongoing responsibilities to maintain (“Engineering”, “Finance”)	Active, no end
Resources	Topics and references you may use later (“Postgres”, “Brand assets”)	Inactive, on-demand
Archives	Anything from the other three that is done or dormant	Cold storage

The core idea: organize by when you’ll act on something, not by what it’s about. When a project finishes you archive it; when a resource becomes relevant to active work you pull it into a project or area.

How to build it in Orimora

PARA needs three collections and the built-in archive — that’s all.

1. Create three top-level collections: Projects, Areas, Resources. Use sub-collections inside each (for example one per active project).
2. For Archives, don’t create a collection — Orimora has a built-in archive. When a project or document is done, archive it: it drops out of your active lists and out of search by default, but stays fully restorable and searchable on demand.
3. As actionability changes, move documents between collections — e.g. a finished project’s still-useful reference note moves to Resources, the rest gets archived.

Tip

PARA means location = actionability. Keep topics on tags, not in deep folders: tag a note postgres whether it currently lives in a project or a resource, and use tag filters / search to pull a topic across all four buckets. Shallow collections plus tags age far better than a deep folder tree.

Why the built-in archive matters

A hand-made “Archives” collection grows forever and clutters the sidebar. Orimora’s archive keeps finished work out of your daily view (excluded from default search and lists) while preserving it — so PARA’s fourth bucket is free and automatic. Archiving is governed by the Archive Any Document permission; see Permissions.

Works alongside the Karpathy brain

PARA and the Karpathy brain template are not an either/or — use both. PARA organizes the workspace for humans (by actionability); a Karpathy-style README organizes it for an AI assistant (where to capture, which tags exist). Lay out your collections with PARA, and add a Karpathy README if you also drive Orimora from an LLM.

Do you need a template?

No. PARA is deliberately minimal — three collections plus the built-in archive, with nothing to copy-paste. Its value is the habit: sort by actionability and archive aggressively. (That’s the opposite of the Karpathy brain, which ships a full README template precisely because it has to teach an LLM the layout.)