PARA is the organizing system behind a lot of second brains: everything you capture goes into Projects, Areas, Resources, or Archives. It is elegant, widely taught, and for a lot of people it works. If it works for you, keep it and close this tab.
But if you have set it up three times and abandoned it three times, the problem is probably not your discipline. It is that PARA charges a toll exactly where an ADHD brain can least afford one: at the moment of capture.
Every capture becomes a quiz
Is this a project or an area? Is a project with no next step actually a resource? Should this go in the archive or just get deleted? Each of those is a small decision, and decisions are the tax. On a good day you pay it. On the busy Tuesday when your head is overflowing, the quiz is enough friction to make you keep the thought in your head instead, where it does no good and costs you all day.
The cruel part is that the system punishes exactly the state it is supposed to help. The more overwhelmed you are, the more capturing you need to do, and the more expensive each capture feels.
Filing later, or never
What holds up under a bad brain day is a system with one inbox and zero filing questions. You capture, and you are done. Context can be added later, when you have the bandwidth: who it involves, when it should come back. Or never, and the capture still counts.
Notice this is the opposite bet from PARA. PARA bets that structure at capture time pays off at retrieval time. For ADHD, retrieval is not the bottleneck anyway, because a good system should be doing the retrieving for you: surfacing what is due, what is overdue, what you asked to see again today. When the system brings things back on its own, the filing was never needed.
ADHD Notes is flat on purpose: one place, instant capture, context optional, resurfacing automatic. Try it free.