What Formula is about

Mission

Formula explores and educates about productivity, knowledge management, and self-guided learning through research-based storytelling and community-driven content.

We support the free education movement. Education currently functions as a closed system built on exclusion. While knowledge itself is free to access, use, and develop, entry into the infrastructure that surrounds it often comes at a cost. We want to transform education into a tool for empowerment and bring knowledge back to people.

What we cover

Personal productivity, knowledge management, and AI-assisted workflows. The tools we teach with include Google Sheets, Obsidian, Claude, and Anki, but the deeper focus is on thinking infrastructure for creative work: structured, methodology-driven approaches that explain why, not just how.

Most productivity content asks "how do I do this?" We think the better question is "why am I doing this at all?" Asking "how" is useless without asking "why" first.

What you'll find here

Everything built in our video tutorials, free to copy and adapt: Google Sheets templates, Obsidian setups, ChatGPT prompts, and formulas. All of it is designed for real daily use, not theory.

New long-form videos go out weekly on YouTube, with Shorts throughout the week. Templates and resources appear here as they're created.

Who makes this

Formula is created by Zhenia Vasiliev — information designer, creative technologist, and productivity practitioner based between Bogotá, New York, and London.

Zhenia holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London and is PMP certified. Their background spans data visualization and information design at The Guardian and Contently in New York, and they currently work as a freelance information designer and project manager.

Zhenia finished that PhD in four years instead of six, and the project underneath it was working out how to capture and process knowledge without drowning in it. Only afterwards, in the Second Brain and Obsidian communities on Reddit, did they find people describing the same problems: notes never reopened, systems that collapse in week three, retrieval that dies. Formula’s current work comes out of that: an Obsidian-compatible self-maintaining knowledge system that stays open to whatever AI tool comes next, and the videos that show how it’s built.

That mix of research, design, and systems thinking is what gives Formula its angle: genuine methodology applied to everyday tools, not surface-level tips.

Why "Commons"

The name Formula Commons signals what we believe in: open knowledge, shared resources, no gatekeeping. The site is designed like a research publication, not a marketplace, because that reflects what it is — a library, not a store.