Styles

A workbook style is the shape a sitting takes over time. A spec missing the style’s opening or closing pages only gets a warning — the build still succeeds. What actually refuses the build is the page budget, the split into halves, and the phase rules (a page in the wrong half, or one the style forbids outright); each refusal names what is wrong and why, and most name the research claim behind the rule too.

Sitting — decide, diagnose, plan

One session, up to ten pages including its cover and closing. It opens with a cover and closes with a decision page, a blank question queue and a return checklist. In between, the pages are chosen for the job: emptying out everything you think first, then narrowing — scoring options against criteria, surfacing the assumptions a plan rests on, or imagining it is six months later and it failed.

Use it for a single decision, a diagnosis, or a plan you need to leave the sitting having committed to.

Series — remember something over weeks

Three rounds of up to six pages each. Round two falls about a day after round one, round three about three days after round two, and, if the deadline allows it, a fourth round about a week after that. Every round opens with a recall page — write what you remember before you check anything — because testing yourself before reviewing is a large part of what makes the spacing work.

Use it for material you need to actually retain: an interview, an exam, anything you cannot afford to have faded by the time it matters.

Incubation — create, name, invent

Up to ten pages split into two halves by a single required break: a generating half where nothing judges, ranks or ships, then a real break — a walk, chores, sleep on it — then a judging half that works on what surfaced. The CLI refuses a judging page before the break and a generating page after it, and it refuses a timer before the break, since time pressure while generating tends to narrow rather than help.

Use it when you are naming, inventing, or need more raw material before you can judge any of it fairly.

Ritual — the same question, weekly

One page, no cover, no closing pages: a check-in or a scoresheet, identical every time you print it. The point of the repetition is that change becomes visible by flipping back through past rounds, which an unstructured page never gives you.

Use it for anything you want to track weekly without redesigning the page each time.

Proof — review a document

Not a workbook in the same sense — this is proof mode: numbered paragraphs with wide margins, built to be marked up rather than composed page by page. Up to ten pages per part; a longer document is split into several parts, each built and handed back together.

Every style’s shape rests on a claim the evidence page grades honestly, from A (robust) down to D (an established practice with no direct study behind it). Weak evidence is labelled on the page it supports, never hidden.