By Tiago Forte The holy grail of self-improvement is a framework for self-directed experimentation and learning that can be used by the average person. The key question such a framework would have to answer is “How do people change?” In this post, I will suggest possible answers to this question by looking at the recent…
A thesis on software eating the world This is an unauthorized summary of the 30,000-word blog series Breaking Smart, by Venkatesh Rao of ribbonfarm, which I believe to be among the most important writing in recent years on innovation, productivity, and problem solving. The series attempts to answer the question “What exactly does it mean to…
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs The history of employment can be summarized as “companies vs. employees.” This tug-of-war was always viewed as zero sum: any gain by labor was, by definition, a loss for management and shareholders, and vice versa. This mentality is captured in the saying: “Employees work just enough to not be…
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…
Listen to my conversation with Daniel Thorson on the Emerge podcast: We spoke about using design thinking for individual improvement and empowerment, how to harness chaos and emergence for personal creativity, and the changing nature of knowledge work.
This is my review of Cal Newport’s new book Deep Work (affiliate link), in which he makes the case that cultivating a capacity for intense concentration is the key competitive skill in the new knowledge economy. First, this is a well-written, thoughtful book with relevant stories and practical how-to’s for cultivating focus. I’m a fan…
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…
At the end of 2014 I received an email informing me that I had read over a million words in the ‘read it later’ app Pocket over the course of the year. This number by itself isn’t impressive, considering our daily intake of information is equivalent to 34 gigabytes, 100,000 words, or 174 newspapers, depending…
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 For the past 7 years, I’ve kept a list of everything I’m thankful for. I started the list in 2008, on New Year’s Eve, on a beach in Brazil. Thinking back over a year of studying abroad, feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for the experiences it brought me, I just…
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