Worked example
Hub cards
Six standing interests, mapped onto the numbering. None of them fit in one discipline — which is the normal case, not the awkward one, and exactly what a hub card exists to fix.
A hub is the one card you are allowed to rewrite, because it holds no thinking — only addresses. That licence is what lets it collapse the drawer separation the four-digit numbers impose. The three index devices →
The six hubs
Each hub sits at its theme’s centre of gravity — the discipline most of its material hangs off — and takes the first free position behind it. Not at a drawer root: N000/1 is free and legal in all five drawers and still wrong, because a trunk card's neighbours are every discipline in the drawer and none of them is its subject.
Two of them share an anchor. Organisations and Ventures both centre on 5060 Business and management, so they sit side by side at 5060/1 and 5060/2 — which is what a two-digit discipline tier costs and pays for at the same time: fewer, broader rows, and the hub doing the separating instead of the number.
Each satellite row below is one discipline of the index and the subjects of this theme that file there — grouped by the role they play, never by drawer. Grouping satellites by number would defeat the whole point of a hub.
Persuasion
Rhetoric is the spine, and the re-cut finally gave it a home of its own: 1060 Writing and rhetoric, the craft rather than the criticism. The outline listed rhetoric twice and the copy under literary theory maps to 1050 Literature — that is the reading of it, not the doing. Everything else here is an application: channel at 2080, influence at 5062, and selling at 5061, which the academy has no word for at all.
Craft
Channel
- 2080 Communication and media — Journalism, media studies & communication, Communication studies, Speech communication, Nonverbal communication, Technical writing, Communication design
Influence
Organisations
The outline gave organizational studies its own node and then duplicated management, HR and industrial organization across two more. The re-cut folds all of it into 5060 Business and management, which dissolves this theme's duplicate problem outright: what needed two groups and a pick-the-live-branch note is now one guide card.
Core
- 5060 Business and management — Management, Organizational behavior, Organization theory, Project management, Human resources management, Quality control, Industrial & labor relations, Collective bargaining, Corporate governance, Operations management, Decision science
Behaviour & theory
Ventures
Entrepreneurship was a single childless bullet in the outline, which tells you how thinly the academy treats it — expect this branch to be almost entirely your own cards. It shares 5060 with Organisations, so the two hubs sit side by side at 5060/1 and 5060/2. The money side reaches into 5063 Finance and investing, the product side into 5020 Architecture and design.
Venture core
Product
- 5020 Architecture and design — Industrial design (product design), User experience design, Interaction design, Information architecture
Money
Mind
Psychology was the largest single branch in the outline, 61 children, and the re-cut keeps it whole at 2040. Decision-making is still genuinely split — now across 2040, 2050 Economics, 4030 Statistics and probability and 1010 Philosophy — so the hub card earns its keep here more than anywhere else.
Psychology proper
- 2040 Psychology — Cognitive psychology, Positive psychology, Problem solving, Personality psychology, Evolutionary psychology, Social psychology, Psychometrics
Substrate
Decision-making
Metabolism
The one hub that sits behind the personal tier. 5051 Nutrition and metabolic health exists because cards like these had nowhere to go: 5050 Medicine and health is the clinic and 3050 Biology is the mechanism. Practice wins the hub because keto and fasting are protocols, not physiology — and the satellites keep 3050 one hop away, which is the whole point of the seam.
Clinical
- 5050 Medicine and health — Internal medicine, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Clinical biochemistry, Public health
Mechanism
Performance
Formation
The widest-spanning theme, and the one the re-cut helped most. The outline carried four adjacent religion nodes — religious studies, divinity, theology, religion — and they are now one discipline at 1020. Catholic theology is the centre of gravity for formation specifically; ethics and philosophy at 1010 hang off it as satellites rather than the reverse.
Theology
- 1020 Religion and theology — Christian theology, Divinity, Moral theology, Christian ethics, Systematic theology, Dogmatic theology
Sources & practice
Ethics & philosophy
- 1010 Philosophy — Ethics, Normative ethics, Virtue ethics, Applied ethics, Medieval philosophy, Philosophy of religion
When your vocabulary is not in the map
Of 23 terms probed from these six themes, 22 have no entry in the source outline at all. Sales, startups, keto, productivity, attention, habit, negotiation, branding — none of them appear. Only “storytelling” does.
They do have homes now, and that is the whole argument for the personal tier: four of the five rows in the last column below are sub-disciplines one filer's cards paid for, because the academy had no word for what those cards were about. The personal tier →
| Theme | Absent from the outline | Files behind, today |
|---|---|---|
| Persuasion | sales, selling, copywriting, negotiation, branding, pricing | 5061 Sales and negotiation · 5062 Marketing and branding |
| Organisations | incentives, business process, people management | 5060 Business and management |
| Ventures | startups, venture capital | 5063 Finance and investing · 5060 Business and management |
| Mind | productivity, attention, focus, habit, note-taking | 2040 Psychology · 5031 Note-taking and knowledge systems |
| Metabolism | keto, carnivore, fasting, metabolism | 5051 Nutrition and metabolic health |
This is not a defect in the map. An outline of academic disciplines records how universities partition inquiry. Your interests are mostly practices — things people do, sell, cook, and pray. There is no chair of keto.
So expect your Antinet to invert the reference. The numbered entries are a skeleton of anchors, not a catalogue to complete. The overwhelming majority of your cards will be your own thinking branching off an anchor. A card on carnivore adaptation is not a missing discipline; it is a descendant of 5051/1, and it will sit among siblings no encyclopedia imagined.
Which is the argument for keeping the keyword index sparse and the hub cards fat: the numbers cannot find your material, because your material is not what was numbered.