Een gesprek met Tiago Forte over Digitale Fitheid en Persoonlijk Kennis Management

Eind vorig jaar had ik het plezier om te mogen spreken met Tiago Forte over digitale fitheid en Persoonlijk Kennis Management.

Tiago Forte is ondertussen bekend van zijn boeken “Building a Second Brain” en “PARA”, waar we het in het gesprek ook uitgebreid over hebben.

In maart 2024 is Tiago Forte één van de deelnemers aan de eerste Europese PKM Summit. Als je er ook bij wil zijn, kijk dan op PKMSummit.com.

Mijn topquote

“I think that idea of resonance, resonance, what resonates with you, what echoes with you, what sort of activates your intuition covers both. It’s almost like your subconscious knows what you need to learn and what you want to learn. It can encompass all of that. If you just listen to it, often, in fact, often I feel my intuition telling me something is interesting. And so I get into it, I give myself permission to get into it. And only much, much, much later do I draw this very unorthodox connection to like, oh, I guess my subconscious was trying to resolve this like very deep issue or problem or worry or anxiety that I wasn’t even aware of that I had to just trust myself to find.”

Tiago Forte

Samenvatting

Het gesprek bespreekt het concept van digitale fitheid, waarbij een persoonlijk systeem voor kennisbeheer wordt ontwikkeld om de productiviteit te verbeteren. Tiago Forte benadrukt het belang van persoonlijk kennisbeheer, een van de belangrijkste elementen van digitale fitness. Het gesprek gaat ook over de relatie tussen digitale hulpmiddelen en persoonlijke groei, en de noodzaak om digitale hulpmiddelen te gebruiken om waarde voor zichzelf en anderen te creëren. Tiago Forte merkt ook op dat het systeem gebaseerd moet zijn op de specifieke behoeften en voorkeuren van de gebruiker.

Q&A

Wat is het belang van een persoonlijk systeem voor persoonlijk kennis management?

In de visie van Digital Fitheid is het hebben van een persoonlijk systeem voor persoonlijk kennismanagement het belangrijkste wat men met computers kan doen, vooral voor kenniswerkers.

Wat is de ultieme manier om een tweede brein voor je te laten werken?

Volgens Tiago Forte is de ultieme manier om een tweede brein voor je te laten werken dat je het gebruikt als een hulpmiddel om te creëren, niet alleen om dingen op te slaan.

Wat is de belangrijkste mentaliteitsverandering die perfectionisten moeten doormaken bij het opbouwen van een tweede brein?

De belangrijkste mentaliteitsverandering die perfectionisten moeten doormaken bij het opbouwen van een tweede brein is van consumeren naar creëren.

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Transcript

(upbeat music)

Lykle de Vries

• We’re about to start a conversation that Mark and I have been looking forward to for a while. We’re gonna talk with Tiago Forte. Tiago, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Tiago Forte

• My pleasure.

Lykle de Vries

• The reason that we’re talking to you is because your book, “Building a Second Brain” was released in the Netherlands in a Dutch version recently. It’s Mark’s book. It actually has the same title. It’s also called “Building a Second Brain” because there wasn’t a good Dutch translation. And your book has been buzzing around in our circles, I should say, for a while yet. So we’re very happy to be able to tell everybody that there’s a Dutch version too that they can read if they don’t like the English version. But a little bit of background, I’m not sure how much you know about the Netherlands. We’re just this tiny little country on the other side of the ocean. We actually do have quite a digital society here. For instance, I think we’re the top country for LinkedIn usage. We have a lot of early adopters. And as it so happens, we also had a very lively life hacking scene 10 years ago. And Martijn Aslander, who’s also co-founder of Digital Fitness with Mark Meinema, was involved with the life hacking movement in the Netherlands then. They invited David Allen over to the Netherlands and he actually ended up living here. And he opened the first month of Digital Fitness that was organized last year. So we were very happy with that. And there’s a little bit about that I’m gonna tell you in a bit. But just as for an introduction, Mark here and Martijn co-founded Digital Fitness about two years ago, after writing a book that basically concluded that knowledge work as we know it in the Netherlands is kind of broken because we’re not doing it right. We actually do not work well at all in the digital realm. And when we came across the stuff that you were doing, we were instantly interested. And in the Dutch version of your book, Martijn actually wrote a quote in which he states that he thinks your book is even more important and will bring about even more than David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, for a while back. So there’s a bit to live up to perhaps, but it just goes that we’re really happy to be able to talk to you. And just to complete the introduction, maybe Mark, you can do a little overview of Digital Fitness, what kind of thoughts are behind it and what the five pillars of it amount to so that Tiago has a bit of a reference.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, I’ll do that, thanks. So Digital Fitness has, in our view, a really strong link with building a second brain because basically what we think is that having this second brain, having this personal system for personal knowledge management is sort of what the most important thing that you can do with computers, for most knowledge workers at least. That’s why we were elated when the book came out in the English version, because I bought it on the pre-sale. So I was so happy when that book came out. The reason for that is that we find that, as Lekla already referred to, that our work is basically broken. So we got all these computers, all this fancy stuff, and at some point we were promised that our life would be boring because computers would automate the crap out of everything. And the reality is that we have sort of a relationship problem with our digital tools. And what we try to teach people is not to know all the knobs and buttons on computers, because that’s not important. It’s about your effectiveness as a person and how a computer can help you be effective in whichever way you want to be effective. And we teach people, first of all, to be aware of what is out there digitally. So what kind of tools there are, what kind of new tools are coming at you. Some kind of digital hygiene. So we get crap loads of information fired at us with almost no filter at all. Like we used to have lots of filters, but one by one they sort of went away and we have to filter ourselves. So now we end up with email inboxes with 200 emails a day. And we’re sort of busy doing the busy work of sorting emails and not with our actual work. So that’s a problem. So yeah, filtering the stream of information, then digital skills, because you really need to know the tools that you want to use to do anything with the computers. And then the fourth element is personal knowledge management. There’s a lot of investment that has been done in knowledge management as a whole. So on an organizational level, but yeah, this is not something I have to explain to you. That has no relationship with you and your own biological brain. So you need something that is for yourself. And then the fifth element of digital fitness is using your digital tools for personal growth. And that for some people that’s a step counter or something like that. For me, that is becoming really good friends with my personal calendar. So my ADHD head can be on time everywhere. It’s different for everyone, but you can actually use your tools for your personal growth. And basically we’re doing sort of relationship therapy for people between their computers and themselves. So that’s sort of what digital fitness is all about in a nutshell. And actually we see a personal knowledge management bit as one of the most important, if not the most important part because people, they don’t get stuff done. They’re not able to find their information or they take lots of time to find stuff. So when the moment you need it has passed, then the information is found or even later than that. So yeah, that’s why we were so happy with the book because we actually, when we do courses digital fitness, we send them the book. So we send them “Building a Second Brain” when we get around to personal knowledge management because it is such a good, it’s not like a theoretical description. I read it really quickly because it’s also a story about how you personally from a need to know all this information, used these tools to actually learn stuff and to get stuff done. So it’s not just like, it’s not for digital hoarding.

Lykle de Vries

• Thing is, Netherlands is just a small country where approximately 17, maybe 18 million people now and 4 million of those people could be categorized as knowledge workers. Basically, mostly sitting behind a desk with a computer, not creating stuff with their bare hands, but using their brains, their networks, their knowledge to be valuable and create value for others. And as I talk to people about managing all the information, one of the items that comes up quickly and when this leads into our first question, I think is, yeah, but that’s mine and that’s not my employer’s information. There’s this thing about the organization in which you work that has a certain amount of knowledge and needs and there’s this stuff that you see as your own. But I think the fact of the matter is that my brain and my connections are different and have a value other than Mark’s and yours. And the organization also benefits from that. So how, if we’re talking about personal knowledge management, do you make a distinction between private and professional?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, yeah, wow. Good place to start. I’m glad we’re among kindred spirits that spend as much time obsessing about these things as I do. Yeah, let’s see. So I only make the distinction to the extent that I need to just visualize in my second brain system. Over here are work projects, just to the side, like right next door are my personal projects. Here are my work areas, here are my personal areas. So it’s quite, in a way, a small distinction. I’m using the same methodology in the same apps, pretty much in the same ways, same categories. I just like to have just a little bit of distinction so that I know like from eight to four, I’m just looking at this part of the list. And after that, when it’s family time, personal time, home time, I’m looking at that part of the list. But I do think-

Lykle de Vries

• So you’re your own boss.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think, I was just gonna say, it really depends on each person’s relationship between their work and their personal life. For me, they’re quite integrated. I’m here in my office, which is the garage, which is about 15 feet from the house. And so geographically, physically, psychologically, emotionally, those things for me are close because I’m self-employed. But I see many cases where people make a bigger distinction between those two kinds of information depending on their situation.

Lykle de Vries

• Do you have any feedback from people that work in larger organizations where they have information management department?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I-

Lykle de Vries

• How do they handle it?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, this is the other distinction. So for one person, you have their personal versus their professional information. But then there’s another distinction between like personal knowledge management and then like organizational knowledge management, which are almost completely sePARAte disciplines. I really try to make this distinction. I always am sure to use PKM, not KM. I always try to, even usually when people ask me a question like this, I say, “Look, I never really worked in a large organization. “I never really had that experience. “So I’m gonna limit my comments “to just the individual level.” That said, now that I have developed this methodology and written the book, now I am starting to be brought into organizations and teams to consult and train different people. So I’m starting to have some ideas, which we can talk about, but I do think they’re quite different.

Lykle de Vries

• So what strikes you? Could you name one or two things that you think are really different if you’re talking about large organizations?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think, I mean, there’s this very tricky question, honestly, that is pretty unresolved, which is who owns the knowledge, right? Like when you are at work and you have an idea, who owns that? Who has the rights to that idea? I’ve actually been, I just read a book on copyright because I realized I need to understand intellectual property to unravel this question because there’s some precedence, like if you create a work product during work hours at a workplace, it’s pretty clear the organization at least has like the first right of refusal for that. But now all those things have been disassociated. Now we work at odd hours, we work remotely a lot of the time, we might just be a freelancer or a contractor or on retainer, all the relationships have been abstracted away and been kind of dissociated. So it’s introduced this gray area where I think you really have to take it on a case by case basis.

Marc Meinema

• Okay. – Yeah, because what if you get your great work idea lying in your hammock in your back garden, which is not important. You don’t choose when you have your ideas or does it depend on where the idea is stored? Did you store your great idea on the boss’s network or on your own PC, which is a stupid distinction, but yeah.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, and it’s becoming higher stakes, right? ‘Cause now it’s almost like, especially with AI, I’m sure we’ll talk about AI, but like execution is getting cheaper than the actual production. Therefore, I’m reading a book on this right now. What that does is increase the value and importance of judgment, decision-making, the actual decision of what to do in the first place. So yeah, if you have it in your hammock or vice versa, what if you learn something at work just in a conversation with a colleague or a client, but then that gives you an insight and you go and start a business on that. Now who does that belong to, right? (laughs)

Lykle de Vries

• There’s lots of contracts that have clauses that limit your mobility in that regard. You shouldn’t be working for the competitor, you shouldn’t start a competing business. But I also understand that over the last couple of years, a lot of those cases are becoming increasingly difficult to win for the company.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah.

Lykle de Vries

• So that for now seems like an unresolved issue, but from your perspective, that’s one of the most interesting aspects if you’re talking about personal knowledge versus organizational knowledge, is the question, who does it belong to? But isn’t that like the fundamental question? I mean, the information and the knowledge in your system was put there by you, but you feed off the rest of the world like everybody else. You read stuff, you hear stuff, you talk to people. So how much of that would actually be owned by you or should be accredited to, well, the bigger society maybe even?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, that’s very true. It’s not even a question just in the relationship between you and your employer. There’s this video series, “Everything is a Remix.” I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, but there’s this idea that creativity is inherently about remixing existing things, and that’s just becoming more and more true. AI itself is just a giant remixing of billions of data points harvested from the internet. So yeah, it calls into questions ownership, but also attribution. Like what is the nature of attribution? What is the nature of citation? What is the nature of… All these questions just became way more complicated.

Lykle de Vries

• Practically speaking, when I read something online that for some reason piques my curiosity and I wanna keep it, I’d like to make a habit of it to not only save a copy of the article, but also to reference the site that I found it on and maybe even take a note on this was tweeted by Mark, so I got it through him. Is that something that you do in your daily practice as well?

Tiago Forte

• Absolutely. In fact, sometimes people have the criticism, they’re like, “Oh, all you’re doing is like taking other people’s stuff and then like stashing it in your system.” But to me, I don’t know how anyone can cite anything without documentation. I mean, I use my notes. I would never be able to cite hardly anything that I use. I really think of it as a citation system. I’m not going to refrain from

Marc Meinema
what you mentioned here. It’s not about the hoarding of the information, but the citing is actually, the moment you start citing information, you’re actually producing something. You’re producing at least an insight to share with someone else.

Tiago Forte

• And you’re doing that person a favor. Your work is not worse the more people you cite and source. It’s better the more people you cite and source ’cause you’re building on their work and then contributing something back to it.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, we’re doing that the whole time with your book among others. And especially the distinction between just hoarding the information which some people have dabbled with and then sort of gave up because they had this Evernote or OneNote system filled to the brim with articles, but no context, no practical use for it. And for me, one of the main insights in your book was that, yes, collect that information, but link it to whatever you, what is important to you. So the projects that you’re doing, if it’s a serious work project or a hobby, all with a purpose at the end that you want to put something out there using the sources that you found.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, absolutely.

Lykle de Vries

• It’s just something you’re interested in, right? And you don’t know if it’s gonna be of use at any time in the future. Does that hold you back from gathering and archiving the information?

Tiago Forte

• I don’t feel like it does. I feel like I read and consume information for both purposes. It’s like a spectrum all the way on one side from pure utility. A couple of years ago, we got a puppy. I’m reading the puppy training book, pure utility. I have no interest, personal interest in dog training. But then, I don’t know, I’m reading a book right now on the new space race, Blue Origin versus SpaceX. Nothing that I do requires knowledge of rocket design. It’s like pure interest. And honestly, the genres that I read the most are historical fiction and science fiction, which are both fiction. They’re made up stories.

Lykle de Vries

• Either in the past or in the future, right. (laughing) But they do bring you storylines. They do bring you motivation, insights. They bring you interaction between characters and systems. So they bring a lot of knowledge in the end through, well, hypothesizing about how things could have been or will be. If you’re building your personal knowledge management system, then I just think most people do that for non-fictional stuff, actually.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think there’s a lot of crossover. I have the story of Octavia Butler in my book, who was this fantastical science fiction writer. She was one of the most determined and long-term commonplace bookkeepers that I’ve ever found. She would go study the Incan ruins in person and go and take extensive notes to understand what civilizational collapse looks like so that she could write about it. To me, realistic fiction is detailed. It’s realistic. It actually makes use of real things from the real world. So you need research. And likewise, often the biggest insights I get for say my own writing, which is non-fiction, it’s like product from fiction, right? Because you read an interesting character that gives you some, even though it’s all made up, if it’s good, it’s based on some psychological insight of how humans work. And then often I can get that and in a mysterious way apply it to even my boring how-to writing. (laughs)

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, so basically for you, the distinction between what you collect and what you just don’t collect is just pure interest. And that interest can be for whichever reason, like just interest because you like reading it and utility, is that it? Because you want to prevent being a hoarder in some way.

Tiago Forte

• I think that idea of resonance, resonance, what resonates with you, what echoes with you, what sort of activates your intuition covers both. It’s almost like your subconscious knows what you need to learn and what you want to learn. It can encompass all of that. If you just listen to it, often, in fact, often I feel my intuition telling me something is interesting. And so I get into it, I give myself permission to get into it. And only much, much, much later do I draw this very unorthodox connection to like, oh, I guess my subconscious was trying to resolve this like very deep issue or problem or worry or anxiety that I wasn’t even aware of that I had to just trust myself to find.

Marc Meinema

• That’s actually a really good measure for yourself. Like, do I want to learn this or do I need to learn this? If yes for one of these questions, collect it. And if no, then get rid of it.

Lykle de Vries

• Let’s tag on to both the anxiety thing and the resonance thing, because this comes from my own experience, but I hear it from other people as well, both with the getting things done method and your PARA method and this building a second brain. People can easily get lost in perfecting the system, I think. It can be, at first glance, it can be intimidating, but some people are kind of egged on by that and then they’ll keep tinkering with the system and basically spend more time on the system than on the actual content and the filtering and the creating stuff with it. What do you say to people that over-focus, that focus too much on the system and on the methodology?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I mean, that’s the very most common kind of person that finds me and gets interested in my work. That’s like the average case, which I love, by the way, love such people, first of all, because at least they’re motivated. At least they’re driven to something. At least they care. Once you, you can’t make people care. You can’t make them motivated, but if they have it, you can kind of redirect it. And what I would say is to redirect it, just redirect and not even all of it. If you’re the kind of person that is optimizing a system, there’s probably some enjoyment for you. It’s like the enjoyment of sort of arranging things, ordering things, restructuring things. There’s some pleasure. So don’t eliminate it completely, but just try as an experiment. This is what I usually say, like reassigning 10%, 20%, 30% of the time and energy that you’re spending on that to creating things. That right there is the main mindset shift or the main like identity shift that I think perfectionists have to go through is from consuming to creating. When you’re only consuming, it seems never ending. Like you’ll never read everything you wanna read. Never, it’s just never ending. As soon as you start creating stuff, you start realizing most of the content to consume is no good. Like your standards get so much higher once you’re creating something that it almost in a funny way solves the information overload problem.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, that’s actually, for me, that’s very true. Once I create stuff, all the articles that I need, then I’m sifting through all the articles that I might be able to use. And then it turns out that 80% is eh,

Tiago Forte

• Yeah.

Marc Meinema

• Not really useful.

Lykle de Vries

• So creating an output, to put it that way, kind of also creates a flow that drags the right stuff in and does not attract the stuff that you don’t need. So your most important advice would be start doing stuff with it. Create stuff with it.

Tiago Forte

• I think this is something David Allen said, is like, if there’s a blockage or a buildup in any kind of flow, it’s because there’s nowhere for it to go. Like, obviously, common sense, right? There’s no downstream location. And I think that’s, for a lot of people, that’s the case. They’re not doing anything with the information. It’s not going anywhere, accomplishing anything, producing any result. So of course, it’s just gonna build up and be blocked up until it’s just this massive, just a hoard of information.

Lykle de Vries

• Would not creating stuff also be the most common mistake people make, in your view, when they try to build a second brain? Or are there other more common mistakes that you noticed?

Tiago Forte

• I think it’s one of the most common, is they start creating this second brain system without having even an idea in mind of what they’re trying to use it for. You know, in fact, a lot of people are like, they’re so unclear. And the reason they’re unclear is they’re fearful. And they’re not willing or not able to face the uncertainty that comes with just deciding what you want to do or just what you want. That’s it right there. Most people don’t even know what they want. So if you don’t know what you want, building a second brain is not going to give you any clarity or certainty in that. It will just be more stuff that probably just makes the problem worse. (laughs)

Lykle de Vries

• Yeah, so basically– – At best, it will be a distraction, yeah.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, it sort of seems to come down to that people expect this system, this magical system, to be sort of the magic pill that solves all their work woes, and then–

Lykle de Vries

• Well, we’ll get into AI maybe later. Maybe once you have a filled PKM system, you can feed it to an AI, and it will suggest stuff to you. Like, hey, you have all this knowledge on this topic. Maybe you start writing stuff on that. But for yourself, Tiago, were you always clear on what it is that you wanted, or was there a process to it for you as well?

Tiago Forte

• I think this is why I sort of empathize with, you know, that person I described is, took me forever, took me so long to find what I wanted to do. I spent most of my 20s just kind of like, you know, teaching English in South America, then I like worked in microfinance in Colombia. Teaching English was in Brazil, worked in microfinance in Colombia. Then I finally graduated college after six years, and then I thought, I still don’t know what I wanna do, so let me go join the Peace Corps, which is this overseas volunteer service program in Ukraine, spent two years in Ukraine. And I finally came back, and when I was like 27, I got my first professional job. I just kept putting it off, like, oh no, one more experience, one more, you know, a broad thing, one more whatever. So I had this feeling that I started super late. I mean, my peers that I was the same age as, at that point had five years or more work experience, and I was just starting. I felt like I had missed the boat, you know?

Lykle de Vries

• What kind of a job did you start?

Tiago Forte

• Consulting. It was a small French consulting firm based in Paris with an office in San Francisco.

Lykle de Vries

• And what would they consult on?

Tiago Forte

• So it’s called innovation consulting, which is a little bit of a buzzword. But what that looked like practically is different projects normally for quite large organizations that are trying to basically borrow the innovative capacities of this kind of small team of, you know, small team of creative people. And so they would be sometimes marketing campaigns, sometimes live events, sometimes even product development, developing prototypes, developing, you know, websites that demonstrated a new technology or a new strategy. And then often we would create whatever the thing was, and if it worked, they would get it and make it a full-scale thing within the company.

Lykle de Vries

• And was this a job that you took because you realized that that was the thing that you wanted to bring to the world, or was it just the first job?

Tiago Forte

• Oh no, back then it was just, it was a job. (laughs)

Lykle de Vries

• What brought you to the point at which you could say, “This is what I actually wanna bring to the world.”

Tiago Forte

• So I stayed there at that consulting firm just about 18 months, it was quite short. But that was enough, 18 months was enough for me to realize that I didn’t want to be, I didn’t wanna be employed in a company. Even though it was a small company, quite innovative, quite nimble, like it wasn’t a huge corporation. I just didn’t like it, it just wasn’t for me. I think my model for work was my father who was always self-employed, he’s an artist, he paints, he’s his own boss, right? And so after 18 months, I wish I could say I had a plan or some strategy, I didn’t. I just got fed up one week and I was just like, rage quit. Had maybe like a month of savings at most. And I just sort of did whatever I had to do to stay independent. Like the most rent, I’d work events, I would do little side gigs, I would like sell stuff online. I would help my friends with projects that they had. I was just like stringing together one month’s rent at a time for like two years, that was just my only goal.

Lykle de Vries

• So if you look back on it, it must have been both exciting but also stressful in a way, I think, not having a long horizon in front of you. Did it help you formulate your goals or was it just random survival? And was it something else that brought you the big insight?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think what that period was good for was just trying so many different things. I just learned so much about what I’m good at, what I’m not, what I like, what I don’t. And basically after two or three years of that, just sort of trying random stuff, I kind of just got sick of survival mode and said, let me try to build something. Let me build an asset, something that actually builds and compounds and is not trading time for money. And I just looked at all the random stuff that I had tried and done. And this digital note-taking thing seemed like the coolest. It just seemed like the combination of the most fun and the most unique and the most profitable. And it still took me like another year for me because it just seems so ridiculous to build a career, much less a business on digital note-taking. Like, isn’t that something you just learn in five minutes and then you’re finished?

Marc Meinema

• But probably secretly, well, you write about that in your book as well. You have sort of been doing stuff with that for years and years. So you haven’t learned that in five minutes as well. So why should anyone else?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I mean, there were so many mindset shifts I had to go through, that realization, the realization that I have developed a body of knowledge for a decade or more. The realization that my medical condition and that whole very difficult experience was actually a gift that gave me the motivation to share this. The realization that it’s quite a deep subject, that it’s not just, okay, here’s three tips, like every article you see out there, it’s actually an identity, it’s a deep identity and mindset shift. And I’m still having those realizations to this day. Every couple of months I have some epiphany. That’s a lot of what I think entrepreneurship or just developing something is about, is just continuously gaining perspective and realizing the thing is more interesting or complex or subtle than you realized.

Lykle de Vries

• So I’m hearing a second edition of the book coming up as well at some point in time.

Tiago Forte

• Well, I just had my second book acquired. I don’t know if you heard that.

Lykle de Vries

• Tell us about it if you can.

Marc Meinema

• It was in pre-order.

Tiago Forte

• It was, but then we canceled it. I was gonna self-publish it. I was gonna self-publish it on Amazon. It was like ready to go. And then we decided the reception was so good that we decided to publish it normally. It’s called the PARA Method. It’s basically getting one of the techniques from building a second brain, which is PARA, and then expanding that into its own like mini book. That’s coming out in August.

Marc Meinema

• Oh, yeah. I was eagerly awaiting it. So excellent that it’s still coming out.

Lykle de Vries

• Also the PARA Method has similarly been buzzing around and for me, I have to be honest, I’m not the co-founder or any co-founder of the digital fitness movement. So I swing in and out and I had this profound experience from the Getting Things Done training that I received over like 14 years ago. So when I first came across PARA, I was like, wait a minute, I don’t need this. I have the Getting Things Done framework. So could you give us a short overview on how the PARA Method is functional and why it deserves its own book?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of a surprise even to me because this method is so astoundingly simple. I mean, I know school children that are like eight years old that use it all the way to multinational corporations. It really is just four folders that are four different timescales, near term, longer term, eventually, and someday maybe, or probably never. It’s really incredibly simple. And the way that I see it fitting in with GTD is, in fact, there’s a, I wrote an article about this on my blog, but in the Getting Things Done book, he has this flow chart with all the different categories. There’s two of them, one on either side of that diagram. One is called project support material, right? The information that you have to be able to reference to do your projects. And the other one is reference material, which is just like general things you wanna reference. And I remember seeing those and being like, oh, perfect. This is what I’m most interested in. Like, tell me more. But then he has a line in the book where he actually says, these are two very important, critical categories of information, but I am not the, something to the effect of, I am not the expert in them, and those are best left to someone else to talk about. And I was like-

Lykle de Vries

• And you were like, wait a minute, that’s me.

Tiago Forte

• I was like, it was like an invitation. It felt like he gave me a personal invitation to start developing what, I mean, and that’s what Pera is. In fact, that’s what your second brain is, largely, is just a way to manage those two kinds of information more systematically.

Lykle de Vries

• Thank you. So, well, I’ll be signing up for the book as well. And it’s gonna be published this autumn, you said, this fall?

Tiago Forte

• In August (2023) yes.

Lykle de Vries

• August, okay, cool. Well, then we’ll start work on getting a Dutch translation soon as well.

Tiago Forte

• Please, please.

Lykle de Vries

• We know some people that might be able to help. So one of the things, I’m gonna hand you a question next, Mark, but this one’s for me as well, because my biggest gripe with getting things done or getting organized in any way is building up to the repetition, to get into the groove of maintaining the system, which I think is common for a lot of people. I mean, it’s one thing to come up with, oh, this is the way I should do it, and then the hard part is actually executing and staying on track. What would be your advice? What’s the most successful way people get into the groove as far as you can tell?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, yeah, it’s so true. There’s this kind of Paradox, which is you’re following a method, any kind of method, because you just don’t know how to do whatever the thing is. And yet true mastery, I think there’s this misconception that beginners have that they look at experts in any given domain and they think, oh, those experts, they’re experts because they’re following all the rules perfectly. And that’s not the case at all. If you really look at expertise, sometimes they follow the rules, but much of the time they break them or invent new rules, even on the fly or even for that specific situation, they are actually playing with the rules. The rules are these dynamic forces rather than rigidly following them, right? So in a funny way, it’s good to have methodologies and frameworks and principles and all these things, but the more advanced you get, the more you have to let go of those or at least hold them lightly in order to, in a sense, transcend them and use them as just one tool in your toolkit. So ironically, the people who are most successful and experts at building a second brain have the most fluid, adaptable practices, which then makes it hard to learn them or like document them ’cause they’re always changing. It’s a very funny Paradox I’ve noticed.

Lykle de Vries

• So are these people just lax people? Are they easily distracted? Are they very, do they have a lot of empathy for themselves? Allow themselves a long leash, so to speak? Do they have a way of, do they have a type? Are they a certain type of person?

Tiago Forte
Do you mean the experts or the beginners?

Lykle de Vries

• No, the experts, the fluid people, the masters. Are they not so strict or do they allow themselves a lot of room or what is it that makes them fluid?

Tiago Forte

• I think it could be all those things, but I think they have the perspective, the wisdom and the experience to know that there’s no such thing as a one size fits all solution. No tool works 100% of the time. No approach is always reliable. And so they, I think in a sense, collect tools. The more tools you have, the carpenter trying to fix a door or something that has 50 tools is just going to be more adaptable and more effective than one that only has two. It’s having more tools, more approaches, more frameworks at your disposal to fit the situation ’cause every situation is different. There’s never been two problems that are identical.

Lykle de Vries

• Yeah, and then also requires you to be fluent in those tools or at least know how to handle them right. So a lot of experience is required.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah.

Lykle de Vries

• Mark.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, I was curious if once you get the tools and you don’t have to be an expert, once you get going with building a second brain, then you not just want to store your information and then look for it purposefully. So like do a search and then get to the exact right information. It’s also really good to have some serendipity going on. So you’re looking for some material and then you sort of stumble upon something you saved earlier. To me, that is the ultimate way of having a second brain work for you, which is way beyond just saving stuff. Do you know if there are any good ways to make this serendipity happen to sort of force that to happen more often than just random luck?

Tiago Forte

• It’s a great point. I think people really miss this. It’s all about that serendipity. If there was no serendipity, you just do a Google search. Google can just find the answer to whatever your question is. Yeah, I think about this a lot. I think there’s a lot of things you can do. I’ll just give you a few. One is don’t make things too organized. Leave them a little messy. Leave them a little loose. Leave the boundary. David Allen talks about clean edges, very hard edges. That’s important with actionable information, ’cause you need to know what is this task versus that task. But with reference information or creative raw material, you don’t get bonus points for hyper, super strict order. In fact, you think of the messy desk of a scientist with paper overlapping and items jostling each other and touching each other. Think of the paint on a canvas, the color, and the one behind me, which is from my dad, by the way. The colors bleed into each other and some splatters from this color. You want some messiness. That’s one, which is easy. Just don’t try that hard to organize.

Marc Meinema

• The bar for people to start.

Tiago Forte

• Yes.

Marc Meinema

• Just stuff in there and sometimes get stuff that you were not looking for, but that you actually are happy to find.

Tiago Forte

• See, that’s the thing, is you don’t want your retrieval to be too efficient. You don’t want it to be too efficient. Like, you imagine a future where your second brain is an AI and just gives you the one exact answer. I think many creative moments of serendipity will be lost ’cause on the way to sort of inefficiently looking for the thing you think you’re looking for, you’ll come across and stumble across things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Marc Meinema

• Oh, that’s so funny that you’re saying that. This is a way of looking at it. Yeah, I’m actually sort of looking forward to having AI take a look in my second brain because I can also ask the AI to come up with ideas.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah. I think we’ll have to prompt it. We’ll be like, okay, now, that was the answer. Now give me the sort of loosely related things and then we’ll look at those for you.

Marc Meinema

• I’m assuming that AI will make the serendipity even easier than, okay, but just make it a bit sloppy. Actually, the co-founder of Digital Fitness, Martijn Aslalme, he uses Obsidian for his personal knowledge management and he has this page with a search query with random notes. He’s not looking for them, just random notes from all over the place. He’s not doing anything with it, but he just puts it somewhere where he can take a look at it just 10 random notes every day.

Lykle de Vries
I’m kind of reminded about this functionality that a lot of blog sites also have, like on this day last year, two years ago, five years ago, this was written. It’s also not structured other than that there’s a time distance between things. And that also helps you to go back to that moment in time and bring back those memories without any structure other than that’s just a year ago from now. So that would be one way of allowing a second brain to better help you in surfacing the stuff. Wait, that’s great. I wasn’t aware I was looking for that. Cool.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, and somewhere in the book, you say that your second brain should be like a garden with winding paths and secluded corners. So like a garden, basically. I know that there are tools like Obsidian, which makes this garden analogy work like clockwork, like fantastic. But some people who want to start using a second brain have tools like OneNote because their employer has only that for them. And those classic note-taking tools are harder to use, I think, to use with this like a garden. How do you know to create something like that in a tool like OneNote or Evernote?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, are you familiar with my four archetypes? Have you seen the four archetypes?

Marc Meinema

• And yeah, and I’ve seen the interview you had with Anne-Lauren.

Tiago Forte

• Oh, awesome.

Marc Meinema

• About this as well, yeah.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, so this wasn’t in the book and actually was inspired by a similar kind of breakdown that she created, that Anne-Lauren created. But it’s actually become central to our work because we have all these people come into our course and over time we’ve realized they’re so different in the way that they relate to information. We’ve identified these four archetypes, gardeners, librarians, architects, and students. And the first day that people take our course, we put them in those buckets because all the recommendations and the lessons then have to be customized to their archetype. So one of them is gardeners. Gardeners tend to be people that are more, they’re very exploratory. They like to go down those winding paths. They like rabbit trails. They like things, ideas to kind of, they like to plant a lot of seeds and then kind of see what emerges and see how it kind of grows together. And there’s actually specific apps that people in each of the archetypes should use. Gardeners, as you pointed out, really should use the graph-based or link-based apps, Obsidian, Roam, Logseek, that category. But I think it’s important to realize none of the archetypes are better than any other, right? Like you can’t say, which is more important, gardens, libraries, buildings, or classrooms? It’s like they have different purposes for different people, right? What I will say is I think gardeners has been the most exciting archetype for the past few years with the rise of apps like Obsidian and Roam, but it’s mostly because previously, before the last few years, they were underserved. It’s like the people who thought like that, there was no software for them. You had to do something else, right? You had to force fit yourself into some other archetype. But now we have essentially software that is flexible and dynamic enough that even those people can be served.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, so basically it would be better if these people, and somehow, if you tend to be sort of like a gardener, you should really try and get your hands on one of these tools that are more suitable for you.

Tiago Forte

• Exactly, yeah. This is why you have to try out a few of them. You know, check out our YouTube video where I sort of break down the four. Usually people watch that one video, it’s a few minutes, and one of the descriptions, they’re just like, “Oh my God, that’s me. “That’s, you just described me.” – Of these archetypes is really helpful, yeah. – Yeah, they can save you a lot of stuff. If you’ve ever used a piece of software that people are raving about, and you’re just like, “What? “I don’t get it.” It’s probably because it’s for a different archetype. – Yeah, yeah. We have, within this digital fitness community, we have lots of these discussions, and it always comes down to, yes, but you’re probably of this different archetype. That’s why this doesn’t resonate with you. So, also, what I found really interesting was that you say in your book that every change in how we use technology requires a change in how we think. So, if we want to properly take advantage of the power of second brain, you need a new relationship to information and to technology, and even to ourselves. We very much agree with that, as you may not be surprised with, but what did you imply with that new relationship, and what do we need to do to make that happen? – Yeah, gosh. Um… So, I think what I’m trying to get at with that is that a new technology arises, and it’s a thing. It’s like a physical object, an artifact. But that is not all it is. This new, it’s like a capability. It’s a new, it’s a new, you know, force. It’s a new tool that you have at your disposal. It provokes, over time, an economic transformation, a societal transformation, a psychological transformation, even you could say a spiritual transformation. And those all happen at different timescales. You know, like the Industrial Revolution, I feel like we’re still trying to, like, it’s almost like the Industrial Revolution is over. We’re already onto, like, a couple phases later, but we’re still grappling with some of the long-term impact. It hasn’t, it hasn’t, right? It takes so long. And I think a lot about this with AI. Like, AI is gonna take decades, centuries, even. Maybe we might never fully get used to it. It’s gonna take a long time, which doesn’t mean you should ignore it, like, pay attention to it, but also don’t, this idea that, oh, you know, you have to get into it now, you have two months, and then it’s all gonna, you know, the economy’s gonna implode. That’s not true. It’s gonna take a long time. Uh, yeah.

Marc Meinema

• I actually, I just found, I just found a really great YouTube video of British school children being interviewed in the 1960s about computers. And this is, of course, influenced by what their parents told them. And they said, yeah, the future, in the year 2000, we’ll be all lazy and not doing anything, and life will be boring. So this was the image that these kids, and probably their parents too, had about the future. And I feel like we’re in the same kind of moment right now with artificial intelligence, that we think that, ooh, all our jobs are going to disappear and we’re going to be lazy, we have nothing to do anymore. And…

Lykle de Vries

• But in a way, the arrival of artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT, GPT-4, Dall-e, et cetera, et cetera, makes it easier to visualize a different future than the last 15 or even 30 years with Microsoft Office Suite has. So if you’re talking about this new relationship with information, what does that entail? I just came across a university teacher who said, the kids that come in now are so used to their mobile devices that the metaphor of a computer with a desktop and file folders just doesn’t mean anything to them. So we’re at odds. I can’t convey this stuff to them in a way that’s meaningful to me because they just wouldn’t understand. How does our relationship with information need to change from your perspective? What do we need to do?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think there’s going to be… You know, it’s like that quote, something like principles are eternal, but the method or the technique is temporary, right? And you see this throughout history. I mean, there’s principles that I talk about in my book that you can see at work during the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, the idea that you should write down the ideas that most resonate with you in one single central place that you control. Go all the way back to like the ancient Greeks, the word commonplace comes from ancient Greece. It’s been around forever. But the way that that was manifested in each era was radically different, completely different. I mean, take something like PARA. Like PARA is a folder-based system. Probably in a decade or two, it will cease to be relevant, right? Folders will just completely disappear. But then I think the underlying principle, which is segment information on horizons of actionability or organize information based on use case, like your projects, that will continue. It’ll just look very different. And so how our relationship to information needs to change, I think it’s just like simultaneously like understanding the timeless principle, adopting a temporary method, knowing that this one will probably stay the same, but the method is probably going to have to evolve and just being open to that.

Marc Meinema

• Actually, this is maybe a good segway to another question. So you, of course, use with building your, and maintaining your second brain, you use a lot of digital tools because otherwise it would have been like Zettelkasten or something, something analog. So at some point you need to do something yourself to keep up your own digital fitness. So have a good relationship with the digital tools that you use. So how do you keep up with what’s available and hone your digital skills and make sure that you filter the ever-growing flood of information that’s coming in, in a way that keeps you sane? Because with the growing amount of attention, you get the amount of information, the influx of information grows with it, of course.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I mean, I do a weekly review, which I learned from David Allen, which I sort of tweaked for my own purposes. I’d say that’s the main kind of digital fitness routine or maintenance activity that I do, which is really, I mean, in my mind, it’s very simple. It’s just basically looking at five inboxes, five places where information comes in and then clearing them. Clearing can include just deleting the stuff that’s there, moving it somewhere for safekeeping, taking action on it or putting it on the calendar. And I just do those. I don’t even do them all at once necessarily. I just try to do each of the five around approximately once a week. And what that tells me, it’s almost like I’m going in a loop. It’s like I’m going in a circle, checking each of those five boxes at least once per week is enough to give me the security and the confidence that I’m looking at everything. And those five places are just my email, clearing email inbox, my calendar, right? Like what’s going on this week, my desktop on my computer where a lot of files and random stuff tends to accumulate, my note-taking app inbox, which is Evernote, just putting those different items that have been created over the course of a week in my pair of folders. And then my task manager, my to-do list, that’s it. There’s no kind of information that I ever am exposed to that does not fit into one of those five places.

Marc Meinema

• Exactly.

Lykle de Vries
How do you test drive new apps, for instance? How do you find them? And how do you decide to spend time on trying them out or not?

Tiago Forte

• You know, I’m quite a late adopter. A lot of people assume, you know, I’m working in technology education. I must be a super early adopter. I don’t often try tools. I’m usually like the last person in my network to do so. And honestly, what I wait for, I kind of wait as long as I can. I wait until it’s been mentioned so many times, so many people have recommended it to me. It really seems, I like the rule of thumb that I learned in Silicon Valley, which is that a new kind of technology doesn’t have to just be, you know, 50% better or two or three times better. It needs to be 10 times better. The inertia of our habits and routines is so strong that a new kind of technology displaces the old one only when it’s 10 times better. And I kind of like to wait until an app is 10 times better. It’s one reason I’ve been on Evernote for 10 years, been using Things for more than 10 years. I was on Instapaper for probably close to 10 years. That is one that I switched recently because Reader, the Reader app from Readwise, really is 10 times better than Instapaper.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, cool.

Lykle de Vries
Well, I think that also puts a lot of people at ease a bit more because you might just get the impression that if you’re not using the latest, greatest, then you’re not good or not doing well in respect to keeping your personal knowledge management system up. But it makes a lot of sense. It should work for you and you should only change it if it actually means improving the way you work.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, lots of people forget that you have a history with the tool and that is valuable as well. So it’s not like you’re starting anew. If you start anew, then the tool you’re selecting doesn’t have to be 10 times better. It just has to be the best tool. But if you’re already using something, then you have a history with that tool and that’s valuable. And throwing that away, especially if that’s a rich history, is probably the reason, I guess, that a new tool has to be 10 times better because you take on a lot of work to switch from one tool to the other.

Tiago Forte

• Yes, I don’t think people get that. You take on almost like a debt. It’s a switching debt. It’s kind of like, I think of it like a restaurant replacing all of its equipment, its ovens and stovetops and refrigerators. They’re not gonna do that unless they absolutely have to because they’re taking on a huge expense, a huge amount of work. – Exactly. I think I learned this attitude from my father, who’s a painter, like I said. He always used to say, every time a new, when smartphones came out, when whatever newfangled technology, he’d just be like, “Oh no, I only use 16th century technology or older.” He’s like, “I use acrylic and oil on canvas,” is the latest thing that I adopted. ‘Cause obviously, when it comes to paintings, no one would ever imagine, “Oh, adopting a new, more advanced, innovative paintbrush, that’s gonna take your art to the next level.” No one would ever believe that. That’s ridiculous, right? But with knowledge work, I think because knowledge work is so new, we don’t recognize it as really an art form, as a craft. It actually has craftsmanship. And therefore we forget what we know about painting and we think, “Oh yes, adopting, just a 10% better software platform will just unleash and unlock my potential.”

Marc Meinema

• What we try to teach people is not the latest and greatest tools or tricks and tips. We actually give them like a calling card with some shortcut keys and tell them to learn one. So very, very basic, just to learn the craft, as you say, of knowledge work.

Lykle de Vries
So it takes a lot of time to build this up. It only actually takes one child to destroy all of it. I mean, how child resistant are second brain methods? Because I have two young children. I used to have a GTD system and ever since the first one was born, it’s kind of in shambles and I’m still trying to revive it. What would your advice be for this kind of big changes in your personal life that threaten the maintenance and the upkeep of systems like these?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I think it’s at moments like those that you just have to be so flexible and really treat them as principles, not rigid rules. So a couple of things I’ve noticed, we now have two kids. We had a second one in November. So it’s really being stress tested. And I have noticed, so for the most part, it’s all stayed intact. I think the fact that I developed my system kind of empirically through real life experience means that it’s all so baked into how I think and everything I do and all that, that it’s much more resilient than if I just tried to like adopt a very complex system wholesale. But there’s things, I’m actually exploring different digital note-taking apps because Evernote is, I don’t know, kind of it’s been acquired and it’s not clear what direction it’s going. And I’m kind of interested in some of the AI features. And I’ve noticed mobile access is crucial. In the past, when I had unlimited amounts of free time to be sitting on my computer fiddling with things, that didn’t matter so much. But I mean, most of my time now interacting with technology is like holding a baby in one hand and like in the 30 seconds before it starts crying, doing something on my phone, right? Or waiting in the car to pick them up from school and I’m on my phone. Or I’m walking the dog and I have a few minutes on my phone. So mobile access has become radically more important and just ease of use. You know, this is the problem with like Roam. Roam and its category of apps is very powerful, but kind of finicky, kind of like you have to really kind of get in the weeds and kind of like design things a certain way. Whereas say Apple Notes is so basic, you can’t mess it up. You can’t over-engineer it. You can’t get lost in the weeds ’cause it’s just like one document and you just type stuff. So I do find myself preferring just simpler, easier to use more mobile tools.

Marc Meinema

• About reducing the friction of using the computer or using the smartphone as much as possible. And let nothing get between you and the work.

Tiago Forte

• Exactly.

Lykle de Vries

• So we’re kind of crossing off a lot of questions. In the meantime, we did talk about AI a bit, but if any, do you already see a role or specific roles for AI within the context of second brains

Tiago Forte
and maybe even PARA? – Oh yeah. I think AI is going to impact knowledge management possibly more, almost more than any other field I can think of. More even than writing, because it’s funny, knowledge management in a funny way is kind of a necessary evil. Like writing, for example, or drawing, or forms of artistic expression are inherently valuable. Like we would do those and we do do those, even if there’s no like financial ROI or some explicit impact, but knowledge management, I think if we had an AI that could truly produce all the same outcomes and the same value that our second brain does, we would just use it. We wouldn’t do summarizing, highlighting, filing, sorting. All of these are intermediate steps that we take because there’s been no other way to produce that final, the right information at the right time in the right format to the right person. But I think AI will basically eat many of these second brain techniques over time. They basically just subsume them into its algorithm. But the interesting thing is the data still matters, right? I was just reading an article by Dan Shipper that was saying, why does, he was arguing, why does say, chat GPT hallucinate? Why does it make up stuff? It’s because it doesn’t have access to the answers. It can’t look, unless you have the plugins, you can’t, it can’t look stuff up on the internet. It’s not, people think of GPT as a database. It’s not, it’s not like Wikipedia, this giant database. It’s a reasoning engine. It’s more like thinking than remembering. But what that means is that the bottleneck is knowledge. Therefore, who has the knowledge and specifically personal knowledge that is most related to you? We’re going to be the ones, those of us that have a second brain that can train these AI algorithms on our data. And then they can give us answers that no one else has access to.

Marc Meinema

• You see the dawn of tools like this already. And I’ve been dabbling around with Bing and the big difference between Bing and chat GPT is that you can just tell Bing, read this manual. Now tell me step-by-step how I work this gizmo thing or how I program something. So you can just order it to dive into some huge manual and then give you step-by-step instructions based on the manual. If that manual would be your own second brain, your own storage, your own body of knowledge, then stuff gets interesting. I feel that we’re really close to stuff like that. We’re just not there yet.

Tiago Forte

• I think so too. I’m gonna be, I’m diving into this stuff. I’m kind of immersed in it right now because it’s all gonna need to change. It’s all gonna need to be updated to take advantage of what’s coming. It’s like every week the field is changing. It’s happening so fast. So yeah, stay tuned.

Lykle de Vries

• Yeah, and it will take a lot of time for us to find the practical uses and work out the kinks and maybe slaughter Google and Microsoft in the process to regain some freedoms there that we have. Sorry, you were talking about intellectual property and this is one of the big challenges, I think, for these large-scale language models that they consume all this stuff and then who owns the outcomes, right? For now, it’s pretty obvious who the owner wants, is going to be, but I think that also has a, well, that’s a different conversation entirely maybe. I just wanted to make sure we’ve been talking about digital fitness and you’ve been talking about digital note-taking. Do we really need digital technology to build a second brain?

Tiago Forte

• Versus paper, you mean? I don’t, I think you can do both. I mean, I definitely use both. There’s use cases for paper. I think it’s best to just think of them as complementary tools rather than you have to choose one or the other. There’s no law, there’s no rule telling you you have to choose, they’re not religions, they’re not ideologies. You just use the best tool for the job. What is interesting, I have noticed, if you look at my book, even though it is really focused on digital note-taking, it’s in a sense skeuomorphic, what I teach. It is basically, and what skeuomorphic means for the listeners is just basically, it’s getting concepts from paper note-taking and sort of just translating them directly to digital. And you know this is the case because you can use it all with paper note-taking. You can use PARA, progressive summarization is just highlighting, intermediate packets, it all applies. Which, what that tells me is A, digital note-taking is early. You only need kind of concepts from the past if you haven’t figured out the new concepts yet. Probably when digital note-taking matures, when it really comes into its own potential, it will look nothing like paper note-taking and it will do things that paper note-taking could never ever do, right? It’ll be a whole different Paradigm. But I kind of see my book as a bridge. It’s a temporary bridge that I’m hoping is relevant for at least a few years that just ushers in this new digital Paradigm for those of us, which is all of us alive today, that lived in the old world and now we have to figure out how to live in the new world.

Marc Meinema

• Yeah, and even beyond, it could be useful because it’s not about using the tools. It’s also about realizing that having a body of knowledge that is accessible outside of your brain, which is really wired into how you think and how you like to ideate and how do you like to create, that is of all times for knowledge workers. The tools will be different and the methods will be different and PARA may not be of all times, but I don’t think PARA is the most important thing in your book, actually.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. It’s funny, usually in these interviews, people always wanna know the specific techniques. And so I default to talking about PARA and progressive summarization, intermediate packets, Hemingway bridges, these things. Those are the sound bites. But I agree, the most important part of my book is it’s like an attitude. It is a state of mind. It is a perspective that, there’s a few perspectives, the perspective that your ideas matter. They are unique in the world. They have the potential to change things, to make new things exist that would never exist otherwise. The perspective that you can and must take ownership. No one else is gonna do it for you, not your employer, not your school, not the makers of the software. You yourself have to be the owner, the master of that knowledge. The perspective that knowledge is meant to be used. It’s not meant to sit on a hard drive somewhere and just be stockpiled like soybeans. It is meant to go into the world as an active agent, but it needs your help to do that. Those are just a few of them. But these perspectives and mindsets are kind of hidden, embedded in different places in the book. They’re easy to kind of miss. But to me, having that mindset will allow you to confront change. Even as the technology landscape just radically reshapes, you can be in a place of, okay, I am responsible. I am the source of my experience. I know what to do. I can trust myself. I can undergo change. These sorts of like, almost like self-help mantras (laughs) are important.

Lykle de Vries

• Yeah, and they’re not something to laugh at or laugh about.

Ronald Mulder
They’re fundamental. They’re basically what’s required for all of us to navigate these times. I think if we’re talking about leadership, it’s basically what you just described. That’s what we all need and what I wish all of us to find in some way.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah.

Lykle de Vries
We’ve had a great conversation with you. I think we can make a lot of people happy by publishing this and sharing this conversation with our audience. Would you have any suggestions as to other people that we could interview or that we should interview from your perspective?

Tiago Forte

• Yeah. Do you know of Nick Milo who does Linking Your Thinking?

Marc Meinema

• Yes, we do. We don’t know him, but we know of him.

Lykle de Vries

• Yes.

Tiago Forte

• Yeah, I always refer people to him, even though he uses Obsidian, which is sort of like, some people see it as like the opposite of what I teach and what I recommend. I really don’t see it that way. I see it as just, in some ways, like the innovative frontier which is these graph-based apps. I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you. He’s a great guy and lives close by here in Los Angeles.

Lykle de Vries

• Well, excellent. We’ll find a way to contact him and see if he takes up our invitation. I’m through all of my questions. I’m not sure if Mark has any new ones, but maybe, Tiago, you have questions on your end. I mean, you’ve been across the world, but maybe you’ve never been to the Netherlands.

Tiago Forte

• I haven’t. I’ve never been there. I mean, I do have one, actually. I’m curious, I always love seeing the European perspective on just things in general, ’cause it’s often very different from the American perspective and kind of counterbalances it but I wonder if you notice, especially since I’m guessing you have access to both the American perspective from the internet, but then also the Dutch perspective, how is it being received there or adapted or translated? Like how do Dutch people receive this idea? Does it seem fanciful or overly exaggerated? How are they applying it in their lives? Like, what are you seeing?

Lykle de Vries

• Well, we live in sort of a bubble, of course, because our community is already interested and most of the times consciously aware of not being on top of the skills that they might wanna be. My read at this point is that it’s still early, but there’s a very interested crowd already. One of the reasons that makes me say that is that there’s actually quite a lot of pushback from bigger organizations because the existing systems and the people that manage those systems feel challenged. They feel challenged by the notion of personal knowledge management versus company knowledge management. They feel challenged by this onslaught of all these kinds of note-taking apps, whereas they’re just happy to provide you with the Microsoft Office Suite and that takes up all of their week anyway, so that’s all they can do and other stuff should not be secure, could not be, well, you know the reasoning. So I think it’s still early days, but then again, getting things done has been around for a while and it’s a pretty common mindset, at least in the Netherlands, for a lot of people that I talk to. They have their own variations of it, they do parts of it, but they know about the framework, so I think there’s quite a crowd that should be interested and within the community of digital fitness. Well, most people already read the book in English, so they’re buying the Dutch version for a cousin, a brother, or somebody else. (laughing)

Marc Meinema

• I think there’s, not everyone is already, already knows what to do about the problem, but many people feel the problem, that they know they know something and they just cannot find it back for the life of them. So the pain is very broadly felt and it sort of has to dawn on a lot more people that this way of thinking is, yeah, a fundamental step into solving this problem and it’s, yes, having more access to tools is of some importance, but what people already have, like almost everyone and their sister has a tool like OneNote, that is already an awesome tool to start with. It’s a gazillion ways, in a gazillion ways, it’s better than just having your files or your Post-it notes slapped everywhere. The tool’s already there, it’s just people have to realize that this might be the way forward to solve their pain basically, because the pain is broadly felt.

Tiago Forte

• Interesting.

Marc Meinema

• And there’s a big, a lot of people are really scared about privacy and tools that are coming from outside of the European Union, but everyone has a tool at their disposal to use. So I’m pretty sure that people are sort of hesitant to actually start doing the work and then they sort of make up problems that are not really problems.

Lykle de Vries

• Then we’re back to the ownership thing that you mentioned so rightfully.

Tiago Forte

• That is something I, yeah, it’s like, something I love about note-taking is it’s so basic, you can do it anywhere. Do you have a TXT file on your computer? Do you have OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep? I mean, there’s so many free options, so many options that work on your phone, whereas like AI, there’s this one company in Silicon Valley making the one model that you pretty much have to use, whereas note-taking is incredibly democratized. It’s already universal, already embedded into our everyday lives. So you don’t need to use or buy any particular thing in order to do it.

Lykle de Vries

• True. – Exactly.

Marc Meinema
So people basically have the keys to their solution in their hands already, whatever the tool they have.

Lykle de Vries

• Viva la revolution.

Tiago Forte

• Yes, we’re of the people.

Lykle de Vries

• Right. Well, I think that’s a great point to leave it at for now. I’m really hoping that we find a way to maybe get you to the Netherlands next year for the next iteration of our month of digital fitness. By that time, you have two books available, so maybe that will help. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Tiago Forte

• Absolutely. Amsterdam is on my list. I’ve been looking for an excuse to go there for some time. So I’m sure-

Lykle de Vries

• In Amsterdam, then the entirety of the Netherlands is within two hours of drive, so that’s easy to visit.

Tiago Forte

• Perfect. Yeah, I’ll try to make it out. I don’t know when, but I’ve always wanted to visit there for sure.

Lykle de Vries

• Then we’ll make it happen. Okay. Thank you very much.

Marc Meinema

• Thank you very much.

Tiago Forte

• Thanks guys. Really appreciate it. You too. Bye-bye.

(upbeat music) (whooshing)

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