tiago forte is | mistaken

tiago forte is an american citizen who works as a consultant for companies, some big, some small, and single customers. he runs a tutorial channel which i have no reason to tune in and pay. but watching a long talk by him last night on youtube puzzled me.

he started with the notion that the workforce is the main capital of companies and thus: of our society. the human workforce is worth more than the buildings, factories, shipments etc.

he went on saying that us humans have a special value because of our personal memories, our routine and expertise, our means to improvise.

tiago forte concluded that forgetting things, and, in a more current context, not finding data on your computers and smartphones, makes us perform badly. our working year, he said, consists of two or so days of merely searching for something on our devices.

and he concludes that we need certain apps to organize our memories.


this is all wrong. google, back in the early 2000s, asked their employees to stay away from the office as much as they liked. in the IT security world you can only employ a new expert by letting him or her have breakfast as long as they like.

tiago forte’s thinking is that of the last century where everything is about direct performance. a workforce which needs half an hour to find relevant documents is considered bad. in fact, psychologists and philosophers have long known that forgetting things and searching for memories is a creative mental mechanism. we need to deal with suffering, trauma, loss of friends by living with the pain and sadness for a while before putting it away for good. this is not necessary for the personal health but also good for business. a human is no machine.

tiage forte’s conclusion that we should use apps to not forget anything, is, sorry to say this, ridiculous. in his talk he said that when dining with someone and getting an inspiration, it would be too much effort to run microsoft word on your smartphone and typing in the magic thought. he later recommended two apps which take handwritten scribbles, text, audio, video and automatically syncs it with the cloud. but why would i, with that great idea during dinner, want to open that app, and what would i do with it? talk aloud while the main course is being delivered? scribble something with my big fingers?

even knowledgeable english people like ali abdaal fall prey to such simple mindedness.