The Definitive Guide To Digital Productivity - Tiago Forte - #074

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. My guest this week is Tiago Forte of Forte Labs. He is an online blogger and productivity coach, I guess you'd call him, but magician is probably a bit closer to his actual role. Today's episode focuses mainly around a blog post that he wrote a year ago. Me and Youssef and Johnny came across it, thanks to a couple of friends and fell in love with it. It is the digital productivity pyramid. This sounds like the realm of hyper nerds and people who wear Warhammer t-shirts, but I promise you, if you want to make your life more productive, if you're a knowledge worker and if you use computers, this is nothing short of a curriculum that you can follow to optimize pretty much everything. So yeah, expect to learn all of Tiago's favorite tools for productivity. I have tried to find as many discount codes as I can for all of them and link them in the show notes below, but they are beastly. So get ready. And also you will have a friend who cannot manage their inbox or doesn't know how to use to-do lists or is terrible at noting down their summaries from books, send them this podcast immediately. I thank you very much. Please welcome Tiago Forte.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs. We have already bonded over the fact that he too is an AirPods evangelist. And I think that gives you a bit of an idea about what we're in for today. We're going to be talking digital optimization and how we can become more efficient in our online lives. Tiago, welcome to the show.

**Tiago Forte** (2:03)
Thank you, Chris. It's really, really good to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
Yeah, I'm excited to go through today. So, I'm going to get straight into it. The Digital Productivity Pyramid was a blog post that you wrote about a year ago, and me and a couple of friends came across it, and it was a real frameshift for us. I was super impressed with it. And I think pretty much since then, I've been hassling you in your inbox to try and get you on. So I'm very glad that we've found some time to get the AirPods in your ears and-

**Tiago Forte** (2:33)
Amazing.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
To run through this. So let's take it from the top. Can you explain to people who've never heard of yourself or Forte Labs, which is the blogging company that you run, or the digital productivity pyramid, can you explain what it is and your philosophy behind it to begin with?

**Tiago Forte** (2:51)
Sure, sure. So the pyramid really is not a pyramid scheme, I promise.
It is a framework. It's a framework that I developed maybe a couple of years ago. I mean, I formalized it a couple of years ago, but it's definitely been rattling around my head for some years. It really came about when I just realized, as this productivity expert, productivity trainer, productivity blogger, I run around every day making grand promises of revolutionizing people's work performance, and I just realized, well, you have to have some theory of what improvement even means, right?

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
Yeah.

**Tiago Forte** (3:33)
I looked around at what was out there and all the available ones, more tasks completed seemed completely outdated, minutes of focus even seemed overly simplistic.
I looked at a ton of metrics. I was super involved in the quantified self movement for some years. I've given a bunch of talks and I just realized none of those did the trick. Instead of focusing on metrics, on measuring some output, which I think with creative knowledge work is basically impossible, I chose to focus on the skills. What is the ladder, the pyramid of skills that a modern knowledge worker would need to acquire in order to execute their work successfully? A large part of it came about accidentally. I actually looked at my courses that I developed. Each course that I've done came out of the needs of the previous course. I would create a course and then look and then see the people completing it, what are they still needing, what are they still lacking, and then I would create the next course. I've only done three courses, but those are the first three levels of the pyramid. Now, I have my eye on the fourth level, which is starting to emerge. Really, it's emerging. It's appearing before my eyes as the next thing that people need. We can get into what each of one of those are, but that's the basic story.

**Chris Williamson** (4:46)
I understand, yes. I was reading Deep Work by Carl Newport recently. I know it's overdue and his publishers sent me very kindly, thank you Carl, has sent me Digital Minimalism as well, which is next on the list to read. But going through Deep Work, listeners at home who are knowledge workers may not quite understand what we mean when we say that the output is difficult to define. But if you were to think back to a typical job 50 to 100 years ago, cranking widgets I think is the term that Carl Newport uses, which is where you would have some machine shop worker, you would have a bucket of undone parts in one side, a machine that was a process in the middle and a bucket of completed parts on the other side. It was very easy for you to see when a part was uncompleted in process and completed. It was also easy for you to track how much was to be done and how much you had done.