Get to know me
One human, one demanding day job, and a system that ships anyway.
I didn't build this system to be productive. I built it to stay sane.
Most people assume I'm naturally organized. They see the Obsidian graphs, the Notion dashboards, the YouTube channel, and think: "He must be a robot."
The truth is embarrassing. I'm naturally chaotic. For years, my "creative process" was a mess of Apple Notes, browser tabs, and quiet panic. I'd have a great idea on a Tuesday and by Saturday it was gone — swallowed by context-switching and exhaustion.
I didn't start building systems because I'm disciplined. I started because I was desperate.
Three days before a client presentation, I couldn't find the insight the whole project rested on.
I had interviewed eight users. I had noted the pattern that was the key to everything. Was it in Evernote? A Miro board? The notes app on my phone?
I found it with twenty minutes to spare. What stayed with me was the cold sweat — the awful awareness that I almost presented a major deliverable without knowing if my central argument rested on something real.
That panic became the foundation of everything I now teach: your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. The architecture does the holding.
What three years of building taught me
The people with the richest inner lives are often the worst publishers.
Not because they lack intelligence or talent — because no one gave them the architecture to extract it. That became my obsession. A vault in Obsidian. Dashboards in Notion. AI workflows that turn messy voice notes into publishable drafts. Fellow designers started asking. Then colleagues. Then strangers on the internet.
Today the system runs my creative life in about three hours a week.
A demanding job. A family. Consistent publishing. Not because I'm exceptional — because the architecture does the heavy lifting.
I built this site, and everything on it, for the people I used to be: the ones sitting on a decade of expertise with a blank publish button. The Thought Architects who know their ideas have value, but haven't found the system to prove it.
Frank Anaya — PKM Strategist · Systems Architect
- 5× Praxis Fellow · Forte Labs
- Published on Every.to
- Senior Mentor · Building a Second Brain
- 7 Years in UX
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