Who is Tiago Forte?
Author, course creator and founder of Forte Labs. Known for the PARA method and the Building a Second Brain framework, and for co-organizing a six-city meetup tour with Notion at the end of 2019.
This page recognises Tiago Forte for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I keep seeing PARA at the top of every Notion second brain template, and I want to know who came up with it, whether the method holds up, and whether his books and courses are worth paying for.”
This page traces where PARA and the second brain idea came from, what Forte actually did with Notion and when he did it, and what he is teaching and writing in 2026. It does not review his courses or point you at a Notion template to buy.
During college Tiago Forte noticed a small pain at the back of his throat that never went away. Doctors ran tests and found nothing, the pain got bad enough to make speaking and swallowing hard, and it eventually acquired a name: glossopharyngeal neuralgia. As he tells the story in Building a Second Brain, he responded by becoming the record keeper for his own case, taking notes at every appointment and scanning hundreds of pages of medical paperwork onto the family computer so the whole file could be searched and re-sorted by date, by doctor and by specialty. The filing system he built to survive a medical mystery turned out to work on anything.
After graduating from San Diego State he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching English in Kupyansk, a town in eastern Ukraine a couple of hours from Kharkiv, where he also ran a summer program teaching local teenagers how to plan projects. "I returned from the Peace Corps in 2012 and moved to San Francisco," he writes, into a junior analyst job at a French innovation consulting firm. Buried in incoming information, he found David Allen's Getting Things Done and started running a lunchtime workshop on it for colleagues. In 2013 he filmed that workshop as an online course called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss, and, in his words, "within a few months thousands of people from all over the world had completed it." Forte Labs grew out of that one course.
The decade since has been largely an exercise in naming things so other people can use them. CODE (capture, organize, distill, express) named the cycle. PARA (projects, areas, resources, archives) named the folders. Both escaped his own audience almost immediately and turned up in software he had nothing to do with. Building a Second Brain was published in June 2022 and his site now lists it in more than twenty-five languages, with a shorter companion volume, The PARA Method, following in 2023. His third book, Life in Perspective, is scheduled for November 3, 2026.
Four folders, and one rule about where things go
PARA sorts every note, file and folder into Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives. Forte defines it as "a simple, comprehensive, yet extremely flexible system for organizing any type of digital information across any platform," and the sorting rule is actionability: a note on tax law lives inside whichever project is currently using it, and falls back to Resources once no project needs it any more. That one decision is why the method travelled so far. It assumes nothing about the software underneath, so the same four buckets survive a move from a filesystem to Google Drive to Evernote to an Obsidian vault to a Notion sidebar without losing their meaning. In October 2023 he published a single post collecting PARA setups for eight applications at once, Notion among them, alongside Apple Notes, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, WorkFlowy, Obsidian, Evernote and Anytype.
In late 2019 he took the second brain on tour with Notion
Forte was an Evernote user by habit and said plainly that Notion's incomplete offline access made it a poor fit for his own workflow. He taught Notion users anyway. In October 2019 he joined Marie Poulin for a Notion Office Hours session and walked through his blogging workflow inside Notion. Two months later he announced that he would be "co-organizing a series of free meetups in cooperation with Notion, the up-and-coming productivity and knowledge management software," with six cities booked to start: Mexico City, São Paulo, Los Angeles, Manila, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The announcement described the two sides as "teaming up for a world tour, bringing together our communities." The Los Angeles stop was held at UCLA with a Notion community ambassador handling logistics, and the recording went up on his blog in February 2020. In it he made the case for treating Notion as a layer for working documents on top of a stack of other tools, instead of migrating an entire life into it.
The cohort course became a book, then he closed the cohorts
Before the books there was a course. Forte set out, as he put it, "to develop the world's first course on what I began to call Personal Knowledge Management," and by June 2019 he wrote that Building a Second Brain had been taken by more than 3,000 people, with Forte Labs counting over 20,000 paying customers across everything it sold by the end of that year. The book followed in June 2022. Then in early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT reached the public, he stopped running the live cohorts entirely, later writing that the pace of AI releases had forced him to question his most basic assumptions about knowledge and that carrying on with the old syllabus would have been dishonest. The self-paced Foundation course stayed on sale. The live teaching stayed shut for three years.
Fifteen years of annual reviews, and a course rebuilt around AI
He came back in 2026 with something different. The AI Second Brain, announced in March and first run from April 15 to May 1, is a three-week cohort of roughly fourteen hours built around what he calls personal context management, feeding a model your own notes and files so its output stops reading like it was written for nobody in particular. He dates the decision to February 2026, when models shipped with an agent harness that could open files and act on a machine, which made the idea practical. In parallel comes Life in Perspective, out November 3, 2026, which he calls the book he has been waiting fifteen years to write. It is about the annual review, a practice he has kept every year since 2008 and taught as a workshop every year since 2019 to more than a thousand students. The book lays out an ARC method covering appreciation of the past, reflection on the present and creation of the future, and folds the review in as a fifth step on the end of CODE.
Why Tiago Forte is on this list
Open the second brain section of the Notion template gallery and the sidebar you see over and over is Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. That vocabulary came from Forte's blog posts, and he got it there without building a Notion product first. When he did work with Notion directly he did it as a partner: the six-city meetup tour he co-organized with Notion at the end of 2019 put the method in front of Notion users in Mexico City, São Paulo, Los Angeles, Manila, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. He also handed the Notion-specific teaching to Notion people. Marie Poulin got the segment on how PARA behaves inside Notion databases in his 2023 app roundup, and Thomas Frank got a full episode on his channel in February 2022 to rate Notion as a notes app on camera. Forte Labs now sells an official Second Brain Notion template built by its own team, with general manager Julia Saxena presenting the walkthrough.
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