How To Deal With Information Overwhelm - Tiago Forte

You can just imagine someone with 100% creativity and 0% productivity. They might have the most brilliant imagination and ideas, and no one would ever know, and it won't ever matter because not one piece of work will be finished. And then you have someone full of productivity, no creativity, they're basically a machine just churning out identical widgets. Productivity is about getting it done. Creativity is about getting it right.

Tiago Forte, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here, Chris. It's been a while.

Three and a half years, it's been. A very long while.

Yeah. I'm, I'm excited to ... I don't ... (clears throat) In fact, I very rarely do follow-up episodes, so I'm glad we can have a part two.

Me too. Are you ... Would you consider yourself the new David Allen now of 2022?

(laughs) S- Other people have said that. I, I try to be modest, but I mean, that's my, 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.

Why? Why is he a hero?

(clears throat) 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, 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, you know, the ends of the earth. And I just admire that kind of persistence on one thing because, because it's so important for people.

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 i- like a Sisyphean task in itself, and it can end up being super unproductive because of your constant obsession about tools and techniques and tactics.

Yeah, it's a great question. It can easily become a hobby. It can become a lifestyle, right? So the way I think of this is productivity is a phase. (clears throat) There's a career in, or there's a s- a s- a phase in your career, in your job, in your business where you should obsess about pro- about productivity, if you just make it as efficient as possible. But then it's ... Productivity, it's like reading and writing and arithmetic. It's this, this foundational fundamental layer, right? Like, 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 cl- 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 te- level ten, just get to like level six or seven. (laughs) Um, and then you move on to essentially higher sources of leverage, which are creativity, which are management, leadership, uh, creating content, leveraging systems. Like there's all these things that, that are much higher order, but that you need that basic personal productivity to take advantage of.