Supercharged Effortless Productivity - Tiago Forte - #501

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tiago Forte. He's a productivity coach, founder of Forte Labs and an author. The world has far, far too much information in it. Humans don't do well when they're overwhelmed with incoming signals, and yet we can't stop ourselves from wanting to acquire more interesting insights. Thankfully, Tiago has created one of the world's most popular systems to capture, organize, distil and express pretty much anything. Expect to learn the most important apps Tiago uses to enhance his productivity, why everyone needs to go through an insane efficiency stage in life, how he's moving beyond pure productivity and into something more holistic, why read later apps can save your life, how to use the relationship between productivity and creativity, and much more. Don't forget, this Thursday, Jocko Willink, Modern Wisdom. Just set your alarm or press subscribe, which will be an alarm for you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tiago Forte.
Tiago Forte, welcome to the show.

**Tiago Forte** (1:24)
It's great to be here, Chris. It's been a while.

**Chris Williamson** (1:26)
Three and a half years it's been, a very long while.

**Tiago Forte** (1:31)
Yeah, I'm excited to, I don't, in fact, I very rarely do follow up episodes, so I'm glad we can have a part two.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
Me too. Are you, would you consider yourself the new David Allen now of 2022?

**Tiago Forte** (1:45)
Other people have said that. I try to be modest, but I mean, that's my aspiration, to be honest, if I can make even half the impact he made on the world, I'd be, I'd go to my grave happy.

**Chris Williamson** (1:56)
Why? Why is he a hero?

**Tiago Forte** (1:58)
I think just the way he did it. There's a lot of thought leaders, a lot of productivity authors, a lot of people who have created methodologies, but I think the fact that he took it to its full potential, I think is the main thing. It's so, it would be so easy to just write one book after another, sort of roam around to different subjects, make a name for yourself, but he just spent decade upon decade really just translating his principles into every format, every medium, every channel to really make sure it reached the ends of the earth. And I just admire that kind of persistence on one thing because it's so important for people.

**Chris Williamson** (2:36)
The fact that people still use the GTD method 30 years after he first wrote about it, I think kind of shows the test of time. So given the fact that you're someone who spends a lot of time thinking about systems and productivity and stuff like that, how do you and how can other people avoid obsessing over productivity too much? Because looking at productivity can become a task in it, like a Sisyphean task in itself, and you can end up being super unproductive because of your constant obsession about tools and techniques and tactics.

**Tiago Forte** (3:10)
Yeah, it's a great question. It can easily become a hobby, can become a lifestyle, right? So the way I think of this is productivity is a phase.
There's a career in, or there's a phase in your career, in your job, in your business, where you should obsess about productivity. You should just make it as efficient as possible. But then, it's productivity, it's like reading and writing and arithmetic. It's this foundational fundamental layer, right? Like if you don't have just the basic ability to like, say you're going to do something and then do it, to just clearly go from step one to step two to step three, which is what productivity is, nothing else you do, no other source of leverage is going to work for you. You don't have to perfect it. You don't have to take it to level 10, just get to like level six or seven. Then you move on to essentially higher sources of leverage, which are creativity, which are management, leadership, creating content, leveraging systems. Like there's all these things that are much higher order, but that you need that basic personal productivity to take advantage of.

**Chris Williamson** (4:17)
Yeah, I like that. I think a lot of the time when we're thinking about the stuff that we do in life and the tasks that we have in front of us and the personal development that we're doing, we look at what we're working on now and forget that we're going to complete that at some point, or at least I do. My time discounting basically doesn't exist. And I just see an endless, let's say that I'm working on my overhead position in the gym or I'm learning the Pomodoro Technique or something. That's it. That's me for the rest of the time. But it's not, it's not, you're right. The analogy is precisely correct between arithmetic or learning maths or learning something in school, right? You don't go back and learn what two plus two equals. Now it's there. You now are able to build off the back of that knowledge. So if you were to say, if you were to create a high level syllabus, or if you were to just pick the main things that people need to know, what would your productivity driver's license, what would it consist of?