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Biography · Knowledge Management

Tiago Forte

Reference entry · last updated September 4, 2026

Tiago Forte is an American writer, educator, and productivity consultant, and the founder of Forte Labs. He is the creator of the PARA method and the CODE method for personal knowledge management, and the author of Building a Second Brain (2022) and The PARA Method (2023).[1]

Background and career

Forte is a first-generation American who grew up in Orange County, California, in a Brazilian-Filipino household.[1] He studied international business at San Diego State University; earlier jobs included fixing computers for fellow students, teaching iLife software at an Apple Store in San Diego, and working on a microfinance crowdfunding project at a nonprofit in Colombia.[1]

He served in the Peace Corps as an English teacher in Kupyansk, Ukraine, where he has written that he taught basic productivity techniques — building a schedule, formulating goals, identifying existing resources — to local youth.[1] Afterward he worked as a junior analyst at a French innovation-consulting firm in San Francisco; overwhelmed by the volume of information the job generated, he read David Allen's Getting Things Done, which redirected him toward teaching productivity methods.[1]

In 2013 he released an online course on Getting Things Done, "Get Stuff Done Like a Boss"; its reception led him to found Forte Labs, which by 2019 had taught more than 20,000 paying customers.[1] He now lives in Long Beach, California.[2]

The PARA method

PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) is a system for organizing digital information by actionability rather than by topic or subject.[3]

• Projects: short-term efforts, undertaken with a specific goal in mind, that have a defined end.
• Areas: ongoing responsibilities requiring continuous attention, with no end date.
• Resources: topics of ongoing interest or reference material, independent of any active project.
• Archives: inactive items from the previous three categories, kept for future reference.

Forte contrasts this with organizing by subject — the way a school library separates Math, History, and Chemistry — arguing that a useful system should instead pull the actions a person is currently committed to closer, making them easier to start and finish.[3] Within his broader system, PARA is described as the structural half, governing where information lives, paired with CODE as the process half, governing what is done with it.[4]

The CODE method

CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) describes the four stages information passes through in Forte's methodology:[4]

• Capture: saving ideas and insights that resonate, based on intuitive judgment rather than exhaustive analysis.
• Organize: arranging captured material by actionability (the PARA structure above) rather than by rigid subject hierarchy.
• Distill: summarizing notes into bite-sized, actionable takeaways through progressive layers of detail, so the content is quickly usable later.
• Express: converting the accumulated knowledge into creative output and sharing it, treating the system as a production line rather than only a storage archive.

Books

Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential (Atria Books, June 14, 2022), Forte's first book, presents the CODE method alongside PARA as a combined system for personal knowledge management.[5] The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life (Simon Element, August 15, 2023) is a shorter, standalone treatment of the PARA structure on its own.[6]

See also

• Nick Milo — a contemporary PKM educator whose Linking Your Thinking framework takes an associative, bottom-up approach where PARA is top-down and actionability-based
• Zettelkasten — the older associative note-linking method PARA's actionability-first structure is most often contrasted with
• Atomic note
• Map of content

References

1. ↑ Tiago Forte, "Tiago Forte's Origin Story," Forte Labs blog. https://fortelabs.com/blog/tiago-fortes-origin-story/
2. ↑ "About Forte Labs," Forte Labs. https://fortelabs.com/about-forte-labs/
3. ↑ Tiago Forte, "The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds," Forte Labs blog. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
4. ↑ Tiago Forte, "Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide," Forte Labs blog. https://fortelabs.com/blog/basboverview/
5. ↑ Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential (Atria Books, 2022). ISBN 978-1982167387. Official publisher page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Building-a-Second-Brain/Tiago-Forte/9781982167387
6. ↑ Tiago Forte, The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life (Simon Element, 2023). ISBN 978-1668045565. Official publisher page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-PARA-Method/Tiago-Forte/9781668045565