I believe that moods (or less colloquially, states of mind) can be used not just defensively, making the best of whatever mood you’re in (as I described in Productivity for Precious Snowflakes). They can also be used offensively, to proactively create the conditions for rapid acceleration and value creation. Let’s begin with a simple question:…
An Integrated Total Life Management System By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. One of the key insights of Getting Things Done, the book on personal productivity by David Allen that spawned the worldwide movement known as GTD, was that…
Learning in the 21st century is not about acquiring more information, knowledge, or even insights. The goal is to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions. But you have to get there one step at a time. When you first start learning, early in life, there is a bottleneck in the amount of information you have…
Originally published on the Evernote blog To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. Consider a typical working session of a couple hours. You set aside the time, silence your phone, and clear your desk, determined to finish some Work of Real Value. We know that time…
Nearly every science-fiction novel seems to agree on one thing: in the future, work will be indistinguishable from art. Such wide agreement suggests that work is far more than a means of income generation. Even in a robot servant utopia, with all our practical needs taken care of, human work will still have a purpose….
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of productivity for those of…
I spend 17 minutes per day on email, or 7.43% of my total work time over the past 12 months. The average knowledge worker, in contrast, spends 28% of their time reading, writing, and responding to email — nearly 4 times as much. The key to Inbox Zero, everyone knows, is to “touch each email only once.”…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. I recently had the privilege of joining David Allen on his members-only In Conversation podcast. This is the only public place you can listen to it (1 hour, download available): Our main subject…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs This post was republished on the Evernote blog. To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain. Let’s imagine how you would use Evernote if you had a brain. I previously explained how the standard tag-based approach basically contradicts everything we know…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs In the past, organizations managed change through top-down strategies: new policies and procedures, structured planning processes, and redrawn organizational charts were typical responses. But we’ve reached an inflection point, and organizational transformation is no longer fast enough or deep enough to cope with the pace of change. What we…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs I once promised myself that if I was deceived into clicking on one more sensationalistic headline promising “10 Magical Productivity Tricks to Change Your LIFE OMG!!!”, I would immediately launch a scorched earth campaign against the productivity industry. That was 11 minutes ago. So here we go… Here are…