PARA-ZK combines two systems: PARA for organizing responsibilities and Zettelkasten for developing ideas.
PARA
PARA keeps notes by how they are used:
- Projects are active outcomes with a finish line.
- Areas are ongoing responsibilities or domains.
- Resources are reusable source material.
- Archives hold inactive or completed PARA notes.
Projects and areas are folder-style notes: the note lives inside a folder of its own name. Child notes live in that folder and point back to their parent through frontmatter.
Zettelkasten
PARA-ZK uses three ZK note kinds:
- Spark: a fast, raw thought to process later.
- Digest: your own-words notes from an external source.
- Permanent: an atomic idea that belongs in your long-term knowledge web.
Spark and digest notes are inputs. Permanent notes are the durable output.
Single-Direction Links
When PARA-ZK creates a ZK note from another note, the new note references its origin. The origin is not edited to store a reverse link.
Instead, the origin surfaces the relationship through backlinks and its Cited by view.
Note
This keeps source notes stable. The new note carries the citation, and Obsidian resolves the reverse relationship.
LLM-Wiki
LLM-Wiki/ is a derived layer, not a second canonical knowledge base. Canonical knowledge lives in Resources, PARA notes, and ZK notes that a person may curate.
Wiki pages cite canonical notes through their references registry and backtick citation tokens such as `PZ[<id>]`. Wiki pages can link to each other with normal body [[wikilinks]]. Canonical notes should not link back into LLM-Wiki/; the wiki depends on the sources, not the other way around.
Distilling Sparks
Distilling turns a spark into a new permanent note:
optsidian para-zk:distill-spark source_title="Raw Thought" title="Durable Thought" maturity=evergreenBy default, the spark is kept, marked processed: true, and records the created permanent in distilled_to. You can move the spark to trash during distill with discard=true. The permanent never references the ephemeral spark.