The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information

- ~612 BC Ashurbanipal di Nineveh tablets, sort of structured tag-based library with more than 30k tags found, mostly used to note transactions and other daily life activities

- ~245 BC Callimacus pínakes, another sort of tag-based index for the Alexandria giant library

- ~1545 Conrad Gessner libraries of Babel, personal notes closely similar to "modern" ZettelKasten

- 1673-94 Leibniz's Scrinium Literatum another far similar to Gessner's one and ZK

- 1934 Paul Otlet & Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum, so-called the modern web ancestor

- 1960 Niklas Luhmann's ZettelKasten

Those are just few I remember but there are many others and surely many more not lost in the history. All claim to be universal and all have an ultimate goal: store&retrieve information as easily as possible to produce new one, to evolve. All are closely similar in principles (usage of meta-information, cataloguing techniques of various kind, keep individual "entries" small for easy isolation and composing etc). The web (1.0 so called) is the first general and global example of those systems. All fails though at a certain point.

Long story short: there is no universal method to be followed slavishly expecting magic results, there are common needs, normally solved in closely similar ways with the tools of the time for millennia, the best option is understand the problem and the principle behind all those solutions tailoring one on our needs.

Personally I use Emacs/org-mode/org-roam and various other related package to manage my personal information, suffering a bit by the lack of a more flexible storage than files and filesystems, but still enough to manage almost anything so effectively that I can't use modern desktops/sw anymore, it's not PARA, ZK etc but just another systems, without strict rules, tailored on my needs following the similar principles of all others. Popular modern one are LYT https://youtu.be/RgwnpEBFNUg or Jonny Decimal.

That's how you end with never ending and dying projects. Projects which are dragging for years and decades because the creator just does not "feel it" and at the end abandon them and never releases them. Thinking about the end goal is especially in creative work highly relevant. And a deadline is a good tool for this, as it forces you to think about. And a deadline can be changed, if done with good reasoning.

> GTD recommends to set as few deadlines and calendar dates as possible

GTD also makes a great point about reviewing and analyzing. And a deadline is a tool to force one to review and analyze a project, it's state and goals.

That's not really the same. Note-taking is simply the act of recording something. While knowledge management aims for the systematic approach and is an established academic discipline with a very long history. Though, of course not every random system some guru wants to sell has this level of research and quality. And I wouldn't put PARA there either.

> Second the place where you really need to manage knowledge is at your job.

Depends on your job and live. Most people use PKM for their own hobbies and daily stuff. Work-Knowledge is of course also a big area, but not the only one, often not even the dominating one.

> Using a system that requires discipline at work is usually a bad idea as most people are not disciplined.

Which is the point where a system can help.

> Finally if that method works for the author then good, but I also have also method that works for me which is : try to take notes of almost nothing

So what? Can't the author wrote about their methods just because you have yours?