Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte is an American productivity educator and author best known for creating Building a Second Brain, the online course and bestselling book about organising digital notes, and the PARA Method for sorting information into Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives. He runs Forte Labs, a small education company that sells his courses, books and guides.

Before teaching, Forte served in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, worked in microfinance in Latin America and consulted on product development for large companies in San Francisco. He began writing about personal knowledge management on the Forte Labs blog and turned his note-taking system into a paid online course. Building a Second Brain ran as live, numbered cohorts and grew into the company's signature programme, with more than 5,000 graduates from over 70 countries; Forte Labs says he has taught more than 20,000 people in total.

The course became a book. Building a Second Brain was published by Atria in June 2022 and became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, followed by The PARA Method in 2023. Forte says his books have sold more than 500,000 copies in over 25 languages. His third book, Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review, comes out on November 3, 2026; it is built on the ARC Method for annual reviews, which he has taught to over 1,000 students since 2019 and says he has practised for nearly 20 years.

Forte Labs is based in Long Beach, California, and run with co-founder Lauren Valdez, who leads training, coaching and consulting, plus a handful of staff. Today it sells the self-paced BASB Foundation and Pillars of Productivity courses, the PARA Method guide and books, supported by a weekly email of about 100,000 subscribers, a YouTube channel and a free Circle community. In 2019 he also co-created the cohort writing course Write of Passage with David Perell.

Forte matters to the creator economy because he turned a personal productivity system into a category: the phrase second brain is now used by app makers, template sellers and course creators worldwide, and his cohort-to-book path became a template for other educators.