Hello Medium!
It’s been a while.
This is perhaps the longest I’ve spent without writing on this platform since I began doing so at the start of the year.
But now I’m back.
And this article’s going to be a special one. Ever since my work on Obsidian and productivity began to resonate with people here, I’ve wanted to create a product that captured my knowledge and experience.
This is what I’ve been doing over the last two months whilst I’ve not been posting. Now it’s time for the big reveal…
It’s time to introduce PARAZETTEL.
I’ve been taking notes using various productivity softwares before I even had a reason to be doing so. Back in 2020, I was revising for my GCSEs, or at least trying to…
Instead, I ended up installing Notion and Todoist and fooling around with the features within them. I was trying to think of a way that I’d be able to incorporate these apps into my revision workflow.
In truth, I didn’t need either of them.
What I needed to do was revise for the exams, but this wasn’t as fun as chasing the shiny features these services offered.
A couple of years down the line, I was still interested in productivity and note-taking but this time, I had a real reason to be so…
It was Spring 2022 and I was about to head into university that September. This required some kind of means to get me through the year of study as efficiently as possible.
That’s when I came across an app.
Markdown, offline and amazingly customisable to whatever function I needed to perform.
Obsidian.
See, I’m still chronically non-committal when it comes to productivity software. I’ve been around the block, to Notion, Tana, OneNote and more. This makes it even more surprising that I’ve stuck with Obsidian religiously since discovering it.
I like to think this means it must be the right choice of app.
Obsidian’s been the daily driver of my university work since I arrived last September and since January of this year, of my online writing endeavours too.
However, I’d not lost my shiny object syndrome by this point. I was still trying different configurations of plugins, systems and forms of note-taking.
Zettelkasten was a system I knew of before I’d even picked Obsidian (it was a big reason that I picked the software for my notes originally), and I also read Building a Second Brain after I finished my A-level exams in the summer of 2022.
I wanted to use the power of both of these systems so over a very slow process of iterating and improving what I had in my vault, I eventually developed a system that I didn’t feel like switching from every day of the week.
I published a Medium article about this system, claiming that I was fusing the two most popular note-taking systems together to create a more powerful whole.
And it connected. The article is now one of the most-read pieces on my Medium account.
This made me realise that people were hungry for an in-depth explanation of the system.
The idea lurked in the back of my mind as I finished my university exams for the year and the summer holidays started. Towards the end of July, I realised it was time to deliver.
So I made an email list for those who were interested, advertised it at the bottom of a few Medium articles and began building.
At the start it was somewhat of an aimless process — should I create a video course? Should I create a website? Something else? Eventually, I decided to share the system in the purest possible form — a demo vault that people could download and use themselves.
The result contains the best of all the mediums. A physical demonstration of how I use folders, properties, plugins and settings is included as well as article-length explanations of my theories and principles behind working with knowledge.
These theories touch on Minimal Note-Taking (another popular idea of mine), as well as the evolution of a PKM system and how to stay focused despite all of the distracting plugins and themes that you could be distracted by within the app.
I’ve also embedded 20 Loom videos that run you through how to use the vault, so you have that option if you learn better through a visual medium. Some of these videos even take you into my personal vault to demonstrate how I actually use PARAZETTEL as the PKM driver that actually powers my daily work.
On top of all of this, the vault contains my book notes for Building a Second Brain, How to Take Smart Notes and takeaways few other authorities on the Zettelkasten method.
The vault addresses every problem a knowledge worker and creator is likely to face, including struggling to chase ‘the perfect system’ and developing your permanent notes from fleeting into something more concrete and linked.
How was I able to do this?
Through drawing on the experience of the last two years that I’ve spent chasing different apps in search of the perfect system. I was facing all the problems myself earlier in time.
One by one, I eliminated them, and PARAZETTEL began to emerge as a result. Through the system it provided, I became more productive than I’ve ever been.
And it went straight to my head…
Not long after publishing the first article that covered the system, I published a piece called ‘Don’t copy my Obsidian setup and I won’t copy yours’…
The general premise was that the best system for your work is one you develop yourself, rather than one copied directly from someone else.
Although I agree with this still, I’ve noticed where I was wrong to take this angle on the topic…
Having succeeded in developing PARAZETTEL for myself, I was now able to talk about how I had a customised system for work, conveniently forgetting a critical point.
I’d neglected to appreciate that pre-developed systems are the best place for someone to start building their own. Something that works instantly isn’t going to simply form out of the ether.
After all, where had I started from?
That’s right, PARAZETTEL stands on the shoulders of two giants in the space of PKM — Building a Second Brain and Zettelkasten.
I was treating it as something created completely off my own back.
This was simply not true. I was inspired massively by other players in the space.
And this is what I hope PARAZETTEL will be for others.
Depending on where you are in developing your own system for work, you can take on as much or as little of the system as you like. The goal is simply to inspire improvement in your PKM and therefore in the work that you do out in the world.
Even if you don’t want to embrace the system, the vault contains notes that cover my principles and theory — ideas that work to help productivity regardless of what system, app or variable you’ve changed to be able to do your own work.
Phoebe was one of the first to gain access to PARAZETTEL and had this to say about the pre-release version:
“I was familiar with both PARA and Zettelkasten prior to testing PARAZETTEL and I still can’t believe it never occured to me to mix ‘n match these approaches as it solves all the problems I hade when using them separately. Best of both worlds !!! From the demo version only, I have already made quite a few changes in my own vault that have considerably reduced the friction in my workflow.”
This was exactly what I was looking for. Someone who didn’t blindly adopt all the advice I gave out but carefully chose and implemented the changes that were going to have the most positive benefit on their own PKM work.
That’s not to say you couldn’t use the vault exactly as-is yourself. By keeping things simple and only using the most powerful and well-documented plugins, I designed it from the ground up to be a complete solution for you to use, even if you’re a beginner.
However, I hope that PARAZETTEL serves mainly as a springboard of inspiration for your system, similar to how Zettelkasten and Building a Second Brain did for me…
There are steps in the vault to get you used to working inside it, and steps to help you evolve your system too. This will help shed the parts of PARAZETTEL that don’t serve you, and help you coast into a zone of focused and productive work on a level you’ve never experienced before.
It made sense to build PARAZETTEL. A product that embodies my system, my principles and knowledge. Something that I could truly get behind.
This system won’t only make your note-taking better. It’ll also improve the outcomes of your projects, likely changing the course of your life.
You can find access to the download here…