Tiago Forte

Overall a decent take on personal knowledge management and a clever approach when it comes to digital note-taking apps and the impressive capabilities they offer. I felt like Tiago Forte has the right spin to it, giving the right intuitions and making his techniques usable by pretty much everybody, tackling the digital world without making his method technology-centric. Forte teaches a process, and even if that process is affected by the technological environment, it remains a process for managing knowledge.
Despite the writing quality and the intelligent approach, I found that the added value for me was quite limited. Probably because I realize that I am already quite advanced on that curve and that my homemade systems actually rival or exceed what Forte has to offer.
His method revolved about CODE (Capture-Organize-Distill-Express) which I see as GTD principles applied to Knowledge management. Although Forte pays his homage to David Allen, I see CODE as nothing more than an extension of GTD. It would be worth an extra chapter in GTD rather than a stand-alone book. The Second method presented is PARA (Projects-Areas-Resources-Archives) which clearly originates from classifying files in Windows Explorer, and I find obsolete in the cloud world where we mostly manage digital notes that can be easily linked and tagged. In that, August Bradley’s PPV (Pillars-Pipeline-Vaults) is I believe infinitely superior.
So all in all, good ideas and a good start from someone starting from scratch in personal knowledge management, but the techniques presented are not the powerhorse I expected, given Forte’s success and media exposure.

Strong points
1. Strong intuitions when it comes to personal knowledge management
2. Smart approach recycling the power of GTD
3. Good writing and anecdotes

Weak points
1. Too superficial techniques
2. Not much to add from GTD
3. PARA is outdated, let’s be clear… (plus d'informations)