One filer's tier
My extensions
5 sub-disciplines that my own cards paid for. None of them is canon and none is on the core list — so use the ones that suit your box as they are, or take them as examples for cutting your own, shaped by what you are actually interested in and where you are heading. The reasoning carries either way.
Read the indented line, not the scope note.
The scope note says what I file where — useful if your interests overlap mine, easy to rewrite where they do not. The indented line beneath it is the part that travels: it names the card that would not file anywhere and the discipline it kept colliding with, which is the shape of evidence to look for in your own box. The method →
5030 Education and learning
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5031
Note-taking and knowledge systems
Zettelkasten, personal knowledge management, reading method, memory technique, indexing. Cards about running this box file here.
Cards about running this box had nowhere to go. Information and systems science (4070) is the theory of organising knowledge; a card on how to number a branch is not theory, it is a procedure I follow on a Tuesday.
0 of the 2,576 source terms reach this row — the academy has no word for it
5050 Medicine and health
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5051
Nutrition and metabolic health
Diet, fasting, keto, macronutrients, and metabolic protocols as practice. How a metabolism works is 3050.
Fasting and keto are protocols, not mechanisms. How a metabolism works belongs to Biology (3050) and always did — but "eat before noon" is not a fact about metabolism, it is an instruction.
3 of the 2,576 source terms reach this row
5060 Business and management
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5061
Sales and negotiation
Selling, commercial persuasion, deal-making, pricing, objection handling.
A card on handling an objection is not rhetoric and not management. Writing and rhetoric (1060) covers whether an argument persuades; this covers whether the deal closes, which turns out to be a different craft.
0 of the 2,576 source terms reach this row — the academy has no word for it
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5062
Marketing and branding
Positioning, brand, advertising, copywriting, content, channels, consumer behaviour.
Positioning and copy kept colliding with Communication and media (2080). That discipline studies how media shapes a public; almost every card I write is about reaching one customer, which is the other side of the same street.
4 of the 2,576 source terms reach this row
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5063
Finance and investing
Corporate and personal finance, capital markets, venture capital, valuation, financial risk.
Valuation and capital are not economic theory. Economics (2050) explains why capital is priced the way it is; these cards are about what to do with a term sheet.
1 of the 2,576 source terms reach this row
What this tier costs
Nothing, in addresses. Every row above took a units digit that the core list leaves empty by construction, so not one canonical code moved to make room, and none ever will. That is the single practical reason the tiers are split this way rather than by taste.
What it costs is the claim to be canonical, which is why these are not on the other page. Two of the five — 5031 , 5061 — are reached by no source term at all. The academic outline has 2,576 entries and no entry for any of them. I am not going to hand a stranger my interests wearing the authority of a discipline list. The mapping →
Where these came from
Not from planning. Each of these rows existed as a complaint written on three or four cards first — the near-miss noted on the card itself, in the closest discipline I could defend — and only became a tab once the same complaint had been made often enough to be a pattern rather than a mood.
Three of them trace to standing interests that cut across the numbering: selling and marketing to persuasion work, finance to ventures, nutrition to metabolism. That is the normal case, not a special one. An interest is a practice and the table is made of fields of study, so an interest almost never lands on one row. How hub cards handle that →
Yours will end up somewhere else
Which is the point of publishing them. Take any row here that already matches how you work — a card box is not a purity test, and a tab that saves you a decision has earned its place. But the rows worth most to you are the ones your own cards ask for, and those will land in places I have no reason to number. Extending the core →