The Forte Labs Blog

Dedicated to Exploring the Frontier of Modern Productivity

10 Things I Learned as a VA with Tiago

By Kathryn Tongg 1. Establish the preferred method of communication right away. Everyone has a way they prefer to communicate. Whether this is via phone, text, email or other app such as Slack, determine upfront what your client prefers. This will ensure you’re both on the same page with clear expectations. 2. Be patient in…

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MESA Part 5: The Future of Work That MESA Envisions

MESA Co. considers their method not just a problem-solving tool, but an entirely new way of working. As their ambitions have grown, they’ve begun looking toward a future in which this way of conducting work is nothing more than common sense.

In this article, I’ll outline a vision for what the future of work might look like if MESA has its way.

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MESA Part 4: The Origins of MESA

The MESA Method is full of firmly held beliefs and sharp distinctions. To understand why they’re so important, you have to understand where they came from. I recently sat down with Bárbara Soalheiro, the founder and CEO of MESA Co., and Lígia Giatti, her number 2, to try and understand the origins of this new way of working.

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The 60 Inventions that Shaped Information Technology

This is a summary of my tweetstorm on the history of information technology, drawn from the excellent book Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages by Alex Wright. I mean “information technology” in the broadest possible sense – the methods and tools we use to manage information in all its forms. 1/ This is a tweetstorm…

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Interview with David Nebinski on the Portfolio Career Podcast

Listen to my recent interview on the Portfolio Career podcast, where we talk about my Full-Stack Freelancer Model and the emerging trend of people creating portfolios of multiple income streams, instead of a single monolithic job: Here’s the episode from the podcast website: EPISODE SUMMARY This conversation is with Tiago Forte. Tiago is a thought…

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PARA for Teams

Guest post by Nat Eliason I took Tiago’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) and Getting Stuff Done Like a Boss (GSDLAB) courses in the fall of 2017. At the time, I was a solo operator working on my blog and doing some marketing consulting, and the strategies worked perfectly. But over the next year, I…

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MESA Part 3: The Art of Unlocking People’s Creative Potential

In Part 2, I laid out what I believe are the 10 principles that MESA Co. uses to fine-tune the working environment.

But what are they fine-tuning the environment for? Unlocking people’s creative potential.

The open secret of MESA (and other Accelerated Work Experiences) is that, beyond the rules and guidelines and structures, their true purpose is to unlock people’s potential to achieve more than they imagined was possible.

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