Inside the Mind of a Productivity Master

Welcome to another issue of superorganizers! We explore how the smartest people in the world organize what they know to do their best work.

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Tiago Forte is 5 minutes early for our interview.

I pre-load Zoom to prepare, assuming I have some time to get my notes in order, but there he is. He's smiling calmly, happy to see me. I’m slightly astonished; I’ve never been beaten to an interview by a guest before.

“Give me a second to get set up,” I say. I cough and shuffle papers.

He waits, unruffled.

After settling in to our conversation, I pop the question:

“How does it feel to be a productivity guru?” I ask. I’m genuinely interested in what it’s like — I imagine it’s equal parts extremely fun, and burdensome. What happens when a productivity guru gets behind on his email? What’s his excuse?

Tiago smiles and laughs. His laugh is big and confident and joyful. If he feels a burden, it doesn’t come through.

“It feels pretty great,” he says. “I mean, it’s definitely weird for me, but I embrace it. I embrace it. Why not?”

Why not, indeed.

Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs, and the creator of a host of courses on knowledge management, productivity, writing, and cognitive extension. The biggest and most popular of these is Building a Second Brain — which I’ve taken personally and highly recommend.

What’s interesting about Tiago in general, and his Building a Second Brain course in particular is that he’s taken something that everyone on this list spends endless amounts of time doing, organizing knowledge, and he’s managed to cut through it with a simple idea:

Actionability.

Tiago Forte is all about actionability.

To him, your system should be designed to help you produce more, full stop. Anything else is a waste of time.

He takes this single idea and out of it he pulls all of the tools, and techniques, and hacks that he espouses in his courses.

This is a radical approach because it’s so fundamentally different from the questions we usually ask ourselves when we’re organizing knowledge.

Usually we ask, “What’s the best way to organize this?”

Tiago says this particular question has no answer, and is, in fact, the wrong question. Instead he asks, “How can I organize this to get more done?”

Substituting an old question for a new one turns out to be powerful approach in a lot of ways:

It makes it very easy to figure out where to file a note in your system, for example. And it also makes it easy to keep everything from your Drive to your Evernote consistently clean (as this author can attest.)

But is it powerful enough to handle everything a superorganizer can throw at it? We explore that question and more in this interview.

We’ll cover:

Why actionability is the best way to organize your files
What PARA is and how you can use it to organize yourself
How Tiago uses progressive summarization to surface his best ideas
How he uses Readwise to save his book notes
The RandomNote tool that Tiago developed to increase serendipity
How Tiago sets goals, and performs weekly reviews
How he organizes his todo list
How Tiago develops his productivity ideas
What happens when Tiago *gasp* falls off of his system

Let’s get to it!

Tiago talks about his background

I have a company called Forte Labs. It's an online education company. We produce a variety of different kinds of media from blog posts to videos to online courses all with the purpose of radically transforming people's productivity.

The idea is to take people to a completely new level in what they're able to handle, what they're able to execute, and ultimately what they're able to produce in the world.

Tiago’s organizing philosophy is actionability

My entire philosophy is producing results.

It doesn't matter if you’re organized. It doesn't matter if you’ve saved everything in the world. What matters is the ability to produce, whether that's published writing, or a talk that you’re giving, or any other result that you’re trying to achieve.

Producing results and taking action is such a clarifying filter. It cuts through all of the junk. When you’re going to take action, you don’t need that much information. You get to the point of diminishing returns so quickly.

And that’s what my systems are designed to help you do: organize so that you can take action.

Organizing for actionability: PARA

The primary way that I teach people to organize their information is with a system I developed called PARA. PARA stands for:

Projects
Areas
Resources
Archives

If you use my system, you can fit any file or note on your computer into one of those four categories. The way it’s setup is to organize on a scale of actionability, where Projects are the most actionable and Archives are the least.

I’ve written extensively about it, but you can use it to organize everything from your Evernote, to your Google Drive, to your file system on your computer — it’s designed to be flexible and portable to any platform.

I find that organizing things in this way makes it really easy to figure out where notes or files should go, and eliminates a lot of the head scratching and turmoil that people feel about where to store things.