# Areas of responsibility Areas of responsibility are the parts of your work and life that need ongoing attention and never end: your health, your finances, your home, a team you manage, a newsletter you publish. They're the A of the [[PARA method]]. [[Tiago Forte]] defines them as "important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention." His examples include Marketing, Product Management and Direct Reports at work, and Health, Finances, Kids and Home in personal life. The line between an area and a project is the end point. A project has a goal and finishes when the goal is reached. An area continues indefinitely: you don't complete your health, you keep it at a level you're satisfied with. In the [[Obsidian Starter Kit]], ongoing responsibilities become activities. An activity has a cadence (how often you do it) and a standard (what "good enough" looks like) instead of a deadline and a deliverable, and it's never completed, only retired on purpose when you stop doing it. The test to tell the two apart: if the work ships something, it's a project; if you'd simply stop doing it one day, it's an activity. I kept my newsletter as a project for a long time; it never reached 100% and skewed every progress view. Activities and projects work together: "maintain my plugins" is an activity, "migrate all plugins to the new build system" is a project it spawns. Forcing areas into projects produces projects that stay active for years with no plausible end date, which hides the projects that are genuinely stalled. ## References - https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/ - https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-04-26-para/ ## Related - [[PARA method]] - [[Theory behind the PARA method]] - [[Tiago Forte]] - [[Building a Second Brain method (BASB)]] - [[Obsidian Starter Kit - Theory - The action system]] - [[Obsidian Starter Kit - Tutorial - Running an activity]] - [[Evergreen projects]] - [[Idea funnel]] - [[Program management]] - [[Knowledge Worker Kit - 06.01 What counts as a project]]