Tiago Forte — The Man who Changed Productivity Forever

The untold story of the productivity expert behind Building a Second Brain

Oscar Lagrosen
10 min readJun 11, 2023

On the 18th of November 2013, a guy named Tiago Forte delivered a talk in Silicon Valley. He wanted to show the audience some controversial results after spending 9 months tracking his personal productivity:

“I found that having more active projects, (more balls in the air), switching tasks more often, spending more hours working and spending more time on email were all correlated with higher productivity”

10 years later, he is now one of the most famous productivity experts in the world, with over 20 000 people taken his online courses and over 100 000 copies sold of his best-selling book, Building a Second Brain.

However, the road to success was not easy for him, as he suffered from excruciating chronic pain, memory loss, depression at times, and rediscovered many traumas from his past life.

This is the story of Tiago Forte, the man who changed productivity, forever.

Chapter 1 — The Mysterious Illness

Tiago was born in 1985 and raised in Orange County California but moved for several years in southern Brazil, where he came in touch with a different…

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Oscar Lagrosen

My articles are transcripts from my YouTube videos. Watch the original videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@oscar-lagrosen