It’s almost a year ago to the day that I launched PARAZETTEL for the first time.

And the vault’s role in my life stands as one of the most formative continuing experiences that I’ve ever had. It’s my first effort at offering any kind of product and is what started my online business and began to bring some kind of fruition to writing and growing an audience.

So I thought in this piece I’d go over some lessons from what I’ve learned from this so far as well as introduce the new update to PARAZETTEL a little later.

We’ll get started with the most important thing — keeping things simple…

Lesson 1: Keep things simple

Perhaps it sounds too much like generic advice but in keeping PARAZETTEL simple in a few different ways I believe I’ve done the right thing.

Let me explain — it was better to put together a system that had a general utility for many people, rather than trying to build a system that just a few people would click with.

After all, most of the real work is done by the person who works on top of the vault after purchasing.

I did the same with BASB and Zettelkasten. Took the inspiration, learned from them and then did the hard part of figuring out the goals and mission that I actually had in life and adding layers to the system to help accomplish that.

The PARAZETTEL vault makes it clear to the user that they’re expected to do the work — the vault’s not going to magically make them some kind of sensei capable of doing all kinds of new work.

Building a system that works for your PKM is an iterative process. It’s always changing and that’s another reason why I decided to keep things simple.

Instead of adding lots of features and functions, I went with something more simple in implementation. I thought it better to instead focus on giving details about how to decide what you’re going to use your system for and going about doing this effectively.

After all, the system is a means to do work, not the work in itself. It can be hard to get past this point of productive procrastination in pointless tweaking but on the other side of it is real creative output and useful work.

Lesson 2: Be human

Another basic-sounding lesson, but the fact that I’ve been willing to put all of my struggles on the internet in these articles and then go over how the system has helped me solve a lot of them makes me seem relatable and trustworthy.

The authenticity and storytelling is what people (that’s people — I know there are people on the other side of our screens) are attracted to more so than how-to guides. The step-by-steps and other technical pieces are useful, but really what people want is proof that what they’re investing in has also already helped other people.

And because PARAZETTEL actually does help me and continues to do so every day, the authenticity is very easy to come by. I simply write about the ways that I’ve been using the system to manage my knowledge and create. That’s an advantage to working on something you’re genuinely aligned with.

Another thing…

You can reach out to humans. You can speak to them, ask them for help, give them help in return. So I try to be as human as possible when I’m interacting with those who contact me about PARAZETTEL.

This includes responding to tweet comments (luckily I have a manageable number of followers) and especially emails. I send as many emails as it takes to solve the problems that buyers come to me with, including Loom videos and screen recordings if the situation calls for it.

This is another thing I’ve learned — show character and personality and tell stories. This will accompany the quality and technical details of the product on offer and convince people of your intent and authenticity.

Moving on, let’s talk about the new PARAZETTEL update…

PARAZETTEL V3 — the mobile update

Recently I’ve been posting other articles about using Obsidian on mobile, small insights that over time came together as a body of knowledge worthy of including within PARAZETTEL.

So that’s what PARAZETTEL V3 is about — teaching you to work minimally and effectively on mobile, focusing on one or two key functions for your system and putting them in place.

It shows how to avoid wasting or mental energy in trying to create and maintain something complicated and within the product. There are also step-by-step and video instructions showing you exactly how to set up the shortcuts and quick content capture mechanisms that I have.

All of this is available alongside the existing content in the vault. You can access the best of BASB and Zettelkasten, learning how to manage them together in a way that maximises productivity and creativity.

The last thing I wanted to do when thinking about PARAZETTEL is just say thanks to you, my reader, because without you this could never have come to fruition.

That’s always how I end these articles because I mean it. Every time.

So, as always, thank you for reading!