Author: admin

I started How I Muse for a pretty simple reason: I wanted a record for myself.

I use Muse every day — to build websites, run my businesses, track rentals, plan trips, organize my life — and most of that work just disappears into chats and finished projects. I wanted somewhere to write down what I actually did, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently next time.

That’s why this is a diary, not a tutorial channel.

I’m not here to teach generic prompts, or to pretend every project was a clean success. The HOA directory and the officiant directory both started as problems I was trying to solve for myself. Some parts were fast. Some parts needed correcting. All of it was real work, directed by me and built with Muse.

The intent is threefold:

1. Keep a diary for myself — a place I can look back on and see how I actually used this tool over time.
2. Show real workflows, not theory — if it helps someone else see what’s possible, great.
3. Build a community around that — a place where other people share their own use cases and collaborate, without referral codes or spam getting in the way.

That’s also why there’s a Facebook group with the same name, and why the blog, group, and videos will all point to each other. One diary, in a few different forms.

This is unofficial, by the way. I’m not Meta, and this isn’t Meta’s channel. It’s just me, writing down how I use Muse.

If you use Muse too, I’d love to hear what you’re building. That’s the whole point.

After the HOA directory, I kept thinking about a much simpler problem: if you’re getting married in Southern California, how do you actually find an officiant?

Not a list of ads. Not a site where every price is hidden behind “contact for pricing.” A real directory you can browse by county and city, see who publishes a price, and read what to look for before you book.

So I used the same loop as last time: I direct, Muse builds, I verify.

Muse helped research officiants, organize them into a directory, and build out the site — directory pages, county and city archives, guides on what to look for and what to expect, a contact form, and a way for officiants to claim their profile.

The result is findmyweddingofficiant.com: 413 officiants across 35 counties and 174 cities. Only 91 publish a price, and I kept that honest on the site instead of hiding it — because that’s the exact frustration couples run into.

What I learned this time was different from the HOA build. The data part was easier. The judgment part was harder: what counts as verified, what stays out, and how to be useful without making “best of” claims we can’t prove.

It’s still early. It’s a directory first, not a proven business yet. But that’s the diary part — I’m writing this down as I build it, not after it’s already a success story.

Next entry, I’ll get into the morning routine — the daily brief that starts all of this.

I didn’t set out to build a website. I set out to answer a question buyers keep getting blindsided by: what are you actually buying into when you buy into an HOA?

Dues, special assessments, legal fights, reserve health — most of that is buried, scattered, or just not shown before closing. So I asked Muse to help me build the thing I wished existed.

I didn’t write code. I gave directions, in plain English, one task at a time.

Muse researched HOAs, built a database, scored them for risk, and imported them into WordPress as individual profiles. I checked the work, corrected it when it was wrong, and pushed back when a draft sounded like AI. That loop — I direct, Muse builds, I verify — is the whole workflow.

The result is hoagrades.com: 974 HOA profiles. 968 are published live. Of the ones with enough data to score, 618 are Low risk, 50 Moderate, and 3 Elevated.

What surprised me most wasn’t the speed. It was how much of the work was judgment, not typing: deciding what counts as verified, what stays out if we can’t prove it, and never letting a score be bought or paid to rank higher. The agent did the heavy lifting. The calls were still mine.

That’s how I use Muse: not to replace thinking, but to turn a one-line idea into something real, faster than I could do it alone.

Next up, I’ll show the morning routine version of this — the daily brief, emails, and calendar, run in about 10 minutes.