Tiago Forte
I’m incredibly proud to share news that’s been two years in the making: my next book is coming in Fall 2026! It’s called Life in Perspective, and it represents the culmination of a reflective practice I’ve been refining since 2008: the annual review. If you’ve read Building a Second Brain or The PARA Method, you…
In the summer of 2005, when I was 20 years old, I sat down and wrote one of my first personal goals: “Hold a position in the Associated Student Government of Saddleback College at start of Fall semester (August 22, 2005).” I had just dropped out of college on the East Coast after burning through…
My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. We both saw no pathway to climb in our…
A new, powerful definition of intelligence is emerging out of the AI field: “boundary intelligence.” I first came across it in this excellent piece To Know Is To Stage by Venkatesh Rao, which appropriately, was co-authored by an LLM. Let me step back and explain what boundary intelligence means (mixing my own words with paraphrasing…
It has now been 3 years and 3 months since my book Building a Second Brain came out in the U.S., and I’ve just received word that it has now earned out its advance! That probably doesn’t mean anything to readers, but to me as an author, it means a ton. It means that the…
One of the most influential yet under-appreciated parts of how large language models work is something most people never see: the system prompt. This is the block of hidden instructions given to the model before it ever receives your input. It establishes the model’s tone, boundaries, and behaviors. You can’t change the system prompt, but…
I recently set aside some time to do my mid-year review, a ritual I complete around July each year, and noticed that I felt some resistance to it. In fact, I realized that I’ve always somewhat resisted it. Since I’m currently writing a book on the subject, I decided to explore why. My first guess…
I lifted my eyes from the journal I was writing in on the balcony of my hotel room, just in time to witness a towering block of ice split in half, splintering along its length with a thundering crack. The iceberg it was part of shuddered, throwing off a shimmering coat of frost from its…
I’ve noticed that psychedelic medicine has been on the rise in California and other parts of the U.S. over the last few years, and have heard reports from a handful of friends and acquaintances about the incredible results they’ve had from ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin. In our new home of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, I’ve…
We’ve been living in Valle de Bravo – a mountain town a couple of hours outside Mexico City – for 9 months now. I’ve lived in 5 countries for at least 6 months each, and traveled in another 20, and I think this is the most perfect place I’ve ever encountered for an expat family…
I’m proud to introduce Death Clock, a life expectancy calculator that predicts the day of your death based on 17 personalized variables. Give it a try for free! This is not only the first “app” I’ve ever created myself, but also my first experience with AI-assisted coding, which has become known as “vibecoding.” I can…
In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out. An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long. The kingdoms of Prussia and…