Reorganise into two books plus shared theory and essays

theory/                 EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything
  a-days-walk/            Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/
  seasonal-intelligence/  Book Two: OUTLINE
  essays/                 the six pieces
  archive/                superseded originals, unmaintained by design
  PORTFOLIO.md            the split and the sequence

Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new
layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are
historical documents.

Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four
items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The
low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the
case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the
argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.

BOOK_OUTLINE.md

@@ -1,10 +0,0 @@
-# Superseded
-
-This file has been replaced by the July 2026 restructure.
-
-- **`PORTFOLIO.md`** — the two-book plus six-essay split, and what was cut
-- **`BOOK_ONE_OUTLINE.md`** — *A Day's Walk* (the flagship)
-- **`BOOK_TWO_OUTLINE.md`** — *Seasonal Intelligence* (reframed)
-- **`EVIDENCE.md`** — evidence tiers governing what each chapter may claim
-
-The original fourteen-chapter outline is preserved unchanged at **`archive/BOOK_OUTLINE_v1.md`**, including the full Czech table of contents, the title options, and the reading list — all of which remain useful.

PORTFOLIO.md

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ So: the relevance model becomes Book One and gets the whole argument. The season
 
 **Why this is the flagship:** It has the original idea, the clearest single argument, the best-evidenced practical chapter (nature), and a contrarian position against the dominant "dopamine detox" narrative that the evidence actually supports. It is the book that gets you taken seriously enough for Book Two to exist.
 
-**Length:** 70–80k words, 12 chapters. Full outline in `BOOK_ONE_OUTLINE.md`.
+**Length:** 70–80k words, 12 chapters. Full outline in `a-days-walk/OUTLINE.md`.
 
 ---
 
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ This reframe is not a retreat. It removes the book's biggest vulnerability, and
 
 **Why second:** It needs Book One's credibility, it needs the seasonality evidence handled carefully, and the chapters most worth writing (8–11, the applied work-year material) need real case studies you don't have yet. Writing Book One buys you the year to collect them.
 
-**Length:** 60–70k words, 10 chapters. Outline in `BOOK_TWO_OUTLINE.md`.
+**Length:** 60–70k words, 10 chapters. Outline in `seasonal-intelligence/OUTLINE.md`.
 
 ---
 

README.md

@@ -1,65 +1,49 @@
-# Seasonal Intelligence — project overview
+# Books
 
-*Restructured July 2026. What was one fourteen-chapter book is now two books and six essays, with every claim sorted by how much evidence it can carry.*
+Two books and a set of essays, all growing out of one theory about how people decide what matters.
 
-## What changed, and why
+## What's here
 
-The original project bundled four books that shared a theory but not a reader: a media critique, a seasonal-living book, a leadership manual, and a nature/health book. It also had its priorities inverted — the **three-tier relevance model** is the original idea here, and it sat at chapter 3 of 14, while the **seasonal frame**, the least-evidenced part and the most crowded shelf in the category, got the title and the spine.
+```
+theory/                  the shared foundation — both books rest on this
+a-days-walk/             Book One. In progress.
+seasonal-intelligence/   Book Two. Outlined, not started.
+essays/                  six pieces, publishable before either book
+archive/                 superseded originals, kept unchanged
+PORTFOLIO.md             why it's split this way, and in what order to work
+```
 
-The restructure does three things:
+## Start here
 
-1. **Promotes the relevance model to its own book** and gives it the full argument.
-2. **Reframes the seasonal material** as cultural history plus practical design rather than neuroscience — because the neuroscience isn't there, and the design argument doesn't need it.
-3. **Sorts every claim into evidence tiers** that govern the voice each chapter may be written in.
+**`PORTFOLIO.md`** — the split, the reasoning, what was cut, and the sequence. Read this first if you've been away from the project.
 
-## Files
+**`theory/EVIDENCE.md`** — every load-bearing claim sorted into four tiers, with sources. This is the most important file in the repo. It governs what may be asserted anywhere else, in any book or essay.
 
-**Start here**
+## The two governing documents
 
-- **`PORTFOLIO.md`** — the split: two books, six essays, what was cut and why, and the sequence to work in.
-- **`EVIDENCE.md`** — every load-bearing claim sorted into four tiers, with sources. **This file governs what register each chapter can be written in.** It also identifies an internal contradiction in the original theory that has to be resolved before drafting.
+Nothing in either book gets written without checking against these.
 
-**The books**
-
-- **`BOOK_ONE_CHAPTERS.md`** — *A Day's Walk*, chapter by chapter. **The drafting document.** The eight-day walk spine, opening scene and numbered argument beats for all 14 units, and the argument ledger tracking every claim from where it's raised to where it's paid off.
-- **`CRAFT.md`** — how the book is written: lyric/landscape register, scene-before-claim, the recurring objects, and the rule that keeps Part IV from turning into self-help. **Governs voice the way `EVIDENCE.md` governs claims.**
-- **`BOOK_ONE_OUTLINE.md`** — the strategic rationale behind Book One's shape. Superseded by `BOOK_ONE_CHAPTERS.md` for drafting.
-- **`BOOK_TWO_OUTLINE.md`** — *Seasonal Intelligence*. 10 chapters, reframed as design rather than brain states. Chapter beats to come once Book One's voice is settled.
-
-**The theory**
-
-- **`THEORY.md`** — revised and renamed *The Relevance Theory*. Narrowed to what the evidence supports, with the cut material and the reasons listed at the end.
-
-**Doing the walk**
-
-- **`FIELD_BRIEF.md`** — what each chapter needs from the ground, the nightly capture protocol, the chapter-6 phone protocol, what not to do on the trail, and a map-verification checklist. Carry this.
-- **`drafts/`** — prologue, chapter 3, chapter 5. Register tests; the specifics are placeholders.
-
-**Archive**
-
-- `archive/THEORY_v1.md` and `archive/BOOK_OUTLINE_v1.md` — the originals, unchanged. Nothing has been lost; check here before assuming something was deleted.
-
-## The four evidence tiers
-
-| Tier | Meaning | How to write it |
+| File | Governs | Rule |
 |---|---|---|
-| **A** | Well-supported, multiple sources | State it, cite it, move on |
-| **B** | Contested — real dispute in the literature | Present both sides *in the text* |
-| **C** | Plausible, untested — your hypothesis | Mark as hypothesis, in the text, every time |
-| **D** | Speculative or personal | Memoir or metaphor; cannot carry an argument |
+| `theory/EVIDENCE.md` | **What may be claimed** | Tier A state it · Tier B present the dispute · Tier C mark as hypothesis · Tier D memoir only |
+| `a-days-walk/CRAFT.md` | **How it may be said** | Scene before claim · no apparatus in the body · hedge in first person |
 
-The failure mode this whole restructure exists to prevent is a Tier C chapter written in a Tier A voice. Most of Part II of Book One — the original contribution — is Tier C. Saying so plainly is what makes the rest believable.
+The failure this whole structure exists to prevent is a Tier C claim written in a Tier A voice. Most of Book One's original contribution is Tier C. Saying so plainly is what makes the rest believable.
+
+*Book Two will need its own craft document when it starts. The register is different and `a-days-walk/CRAFT.md` is specific to the walk.*
 
 ## Status
 
-- Theory: revised, narrowed, evidence-checked
-- Book One: outlined, unwritten
-- Book Two: outlined, unwritten, needs a year of case-study collection first
-- Essays: outlined, unwritten
-- Manuscript: **still zero words** — and this is now the only thing that matters
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| Theory | Revised, narrowed, evidence-checked |
+| Book One | Outlined in full. Three sample chapters drafted with placeholder specifics. Awaiting the walk. |
+| Book Two | Outlined. Needs a year of case-study collection before drafting. |
+| Essays | Outlined, none written |
+| Words of real manuscript | **0** |
 
-## Next step
+## Next
 
-**Write essay 1, "Stress Hunger," this weekend.** Roughly 2,000 words on being ravenous after a day at a desk and barely hungry after four days walking. It's the shortest distance between you and a finished piece, it's pure voice, and it's the lowest-stakes way to find out how you write at length.
+**Essay 1, *Stress Hunger*.** ~2,000 words, needs nothing but a weekend and a memory. It's the shortest distance to a finished piece and the real test of whether this book wants to be written.
 
-Everything in these files is a guess until there are sentences. The outline will be rearranged by the drafting regardless — that's what drafting is for. The only irreversible mistake available right now is spending another twelve months on structure.
+Then walk stages 3–6 of the Stezka Českou Kanadou, with `a-days-walk/FIELD_BRIEF.md` in the pack. Four days gets the material for five chapters.

a-days-walk/CHAPTERS.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # *A Day's Walk* — chapter beats
 
-*Read `CRAFT.md` before drafting any of this. It governs the voice. `EVIDENCE.md` governs the claims. This file governs the flow — what happens, in what order, and what each chapter owes the reader.*
+*Read `CRAFT.md` before drafting any of this. It governs the voice. `../theory/EVIDENCE.md` governs the claims. This file governs the flow — what happens, in what order, and what each chapter owes the reader.*
 
 **Ground:** the Stezka Českou Kanadou, Jindřichův Hradec to Dačice. ~120 km in eight marked stages, through Nová Bystřice, Staré Město pod Landštejnem and Slavonice.
 

a-days-walk/CRAFT.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Craft rules — *A Day's Walk*
 
-*`EVIDENCE.md` governs what you may claim. This file governs how you may say it. Between them, they should make it very hard to write a bad page.*
+*`../theory/EVIDENCE.md` governs what you may claim. This file governs how you may say it. Between them, they should make it very hard to write a bad page.*
 
 **Register:** lyric / landscape. Macfarlane, Solnit, Lopez, Jamie. Long sentences that earn their length. Close physical attention. Argument arriving sideways, through image, rather than announced.
 

a-days-walk/OUTLINE.md

@@ -7,9 +7,9 @@
 **Register:** lyric / landscape narrative non-fiction — see `CRAFT.md`.
 
 > **This file is the strategic rationale — why the book is shaped this way.**
-> For drafting, use **`BOOK_ONE_CHAPTERS.md`**, which is authoritative: it carries the eight-day walk spine, the scene design, the numbered argument beats for every chapter, and the argument ledger. Some chapter titles were revised there and those revisions win.
+> For drafting, use **`CHAPTERS.md`**, which is authoritative: it carries the eight-day walk spine, the scene design, the numbered argument beats for every chapter, and the argument ledger. Some chapter titles were revised there and those revisions win.
 
-Each chapter below carries its evidence tier from `EVIDENCE.md`. **The tier determines the voice.** A Tier C chapter that reads like Tier A is the failure mode this whole restructure exists to prevent.
+Each chapter below carries its evidence tier from `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`. **The tier determines the voice.** A Tier C chapter that reads like Tier A is the failure mode this whole restructure exists to prevent.
 
 ---
 

a-days-walk/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+# A Day's Walk
+
+*How We Lost the Ability to Tell What Matters*
+
+**Czech candidates:** *Na den chůze* · *Co se nás týká* · *Blízko a daleko*
+
+Book One, and the flagship. 70–80k words, 12 chapters in four parts, framed as an eight-day walk on the Stezka Českou Kanadou from Jindřichův Hradec to Dačice.
+
+**The argument in one sentence:** the problem isn't that we pay too little attention, it's that the machinery deciding what deserves attention is being fed information it was never built to sort — and the fix is retriage, not abstinence.
+
+## Files
+
+| File | What it's for |
+|---|---|
+| **`CHAPTERS.md`** | **The drafting document.** Walk spine, opening scene and numbered argument beats for all 14 units, and the argument ledger. |
+| `CRAFT.md` | How it's written. Register, the five rules, recurring objects, banned language. |
+| `FIELD_BRIEF.md` | What to capture on the trail. Carry this. |
+| `OUTLINE.md` | Strategic rationale for the book's shape. Superseded by `CHAPTERS.md` for drafting. |
+| `drafts/` | Prologue, ch 3, ch 5. Register tests — the specifics are placeholders. |
+
+Claims are governed by `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`.
+
+## Before drafting anything
+
+1. Read `CRAFT.md`. The whole book fails in one paragraph if the register slips.
+2. Check the chapter's tier in `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`. Most of Part II is Tier C and must read as hypothesis.
+3. Check the argument ledger at the bottom of `CHAPTERS.md`. Every claim has a place it's raised and a place it's paid off; the usual way to break the book is cutting a chapter-5 paragraph and silently orphaning chapter 11.
+
+## What's blocking
+
+The three drafts are built on invented ground — a pond that doesn't exist, a man with an axe, a stone step in a forest nobody has walked to. The architecture holds. The material doesn't exist yet.
+
+**Walk stages 3–6 consecutively.** Four days, ~62 km, and it yields chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 — the core of the book. Stages 5 and 6 must not be separated; chapter 6 only works if the previous day was spent among the emptied villages with the phone off the whole run.
+
+Before going, work through the map-verification list in `FIELD_BRIEF.md` — the tower's position, which villages are reachable, which pond has the right shape. An hour settles most of what the drafts currently guess at.

archive/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+# Archive
+
+The originals, unchanged.
+
+- **`THEORY_v1.md`** — the Cognitive Balance Theory as it stood before the July 2026 revision, reconstructed from the original 126-message ChatGPT thread (July 2025 – March 2026).
+- **`BOOK_OUTLINE_v1.md`** — the original fourteen-chapter outline, including the full Czech table of contents, all the title options, and the reading list. The Czech material and the reading list are still live and worth mining.
+
+**These files are not maintained.** Their internal cross-references point at the pre-restructure layout and no longer resolve; that's deliberate. They're historical documents, not working ones.
+
+Nothing was thrown away in the restructure. If something appears to have vanished from the current outline, it's here — check before assuming it was lost. What was *deliberately* cut, and the reasons, is recorded at the end of `../theory/THEORY.md`.

essays/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+# Essays
+
+Six pieces, publishable before either book exists. They do four jobs: find out whether the voice is there, test which ideas land before a year is spent on them, build the platform any publisher will ask about, and each one becomes a chapter draft.
+
+Written roughly in ascending order of difficulty. Claims are governed by `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`; for register, `../a-days-walk/CRAFT.md` applies to anything that will end up in Book One.
+
+---
+
+### 1. Stress Hunger
+*Personal essay · ~2,000 words · needs nothing you don't already have*
+
+Ravenous after a day at a desk. Barely hungry after four days walking with a pack. The observation, the cortisol literature, and an honest admission that the specific mechanism is a guess.
+
+**Write this first.** Shortest distance to a finished piece, pure voice, lowest stakes. It requires no trail, no research trip and no permission. If writing it is a pleasure, the book is worth two years. If it's a grind, that's worth knowing now.
+
+→ Book One ch. 12
+
+### 2. Why 5,000 Steps in a Forest Beat 10,000 in a Corridor
+*~1,500 words*
+
+The salience-environment argument on Bratman 2015 — ninety minutes in grassland versus ninety minutes on a road, same duration, different brains coming back. Best evidence-to-length ratio in the whole project and the most shareable thing in it.
+
+→ Book One ch. 12
+
+### 3. The Dopamine Detox Is the Wrong Fix
+*~2,500 words · contrarian*
+
+The reward-hacking story is real but shallow; the mechanism is misfiled relevance. The detox literature is behind you — abstinence has the weakest record, and changing *how* people use platforms beats quitting.
+
+→ Book One ch. 6 and 10
+
+### 4. Within a Day's Walk
+*~4,000 words · the flagship*
+
+The three-distance model itself. This is the piece a book proposal gets built on. Write it fourth, once the first three have taught you the register.
+
+Pitch high: *Aeon*, *Noema*, *The New Atlantis*. In Czech, *Vesmír*, *Respekt* or *Deník N* would each take a different version of it.
+
+→ Book One Part II
+
+### 5. The Middle of the Night
+*~2,500 words*
+
+Biphasic sleep, with the Ekirch/Yetish dispute as the story rather than a footnote. The contested evidence makes it better: a thing we assumed was human nature turns out to be a Western European habit.
+
+→ Book Two ch. 4
+
+### 6. January Is the Worst Time to Change Your Life
+*~1,500 words · seasonal hook*
+
+Publish in late December. Tests Book Two's market for almost nothing, and the argument survives even though the neuroscience doesn't — because it's made from cultural design, not brain states.
+
+→ Book Two ch. 6
+
+---
+
+## Sequence
+
+1. Essays 1–3 — three months. Find the voice; confirm you want this.
+2. Essay 4, pitched high — the credibility piece.
+3. Book One proposal plus three sample chapters.
+
+The only irreversible mistake available right now is spending another twelve months on structure. Essay 1 is roughly a weekend.

seasonal-intelligence/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+# Seasonal Intelligence
+
+*Designing a Year You Can Live In*
+**Czech:** *Sezónní inteligence: Jak si navrhnout rok, ve kterém se dá žít*
+
+Book Two. 60–70k words, 10 chapters. Outlined, not started.
+
+## The reframe — read before touching anything here
+
+The original version claimed the brain's daily cycle maps onto the calendar year. **It doesn't, as far as anyone knows,** and the closest real evidence points elsewhere: Meyer et al. 2016 found attention-related activity peaking near the *summer* solstice and working memory near the *autumn* equinox. The seasonality of mood is itself disputed — Traffanstedt et al. 2016 found no relationship between depression and season, latitude, or sunlight in a large sample.
+
+So the book is not *"your brain has seasons."*
+
+It is: **every society before ours built structure into the year, we flattened it, and rebuilding it is a design choice worth making.** Cultural history plus practical design, honest that it's a proposal rather than a finding.
+
+This is a stronger book, not a weaker one. "Here is a structure worth adopting" needs no neuroscience and can't be falsified out from under you. It also opens a real gap — Katherine May's *Wintering* is memoir, Jenny Odell's *Saving Time* is critique, and neither hands the reader a year to actually build.
+
+## Files
+
+- **`OUTLINE.md`** — the full chapter outline and the standing rules.
+
+Chapter beats to come once Book One's voice is settled. Claims are governed by `../theory/EVIDENCE.md`.
+
+**This book will need its own craft document.** `../a-days-walk/CRAFT.md` is specific to the walk and its register won't transfer.
+
+## Why it's second
+
+It needs Book One's credibility. It needs the contested seasonality evidence handled carefully. And the chapters most worth writing — the applied work-year material in Part III — need real case studies that don't exist yet.
+
+**That's the job for the year between the two books:** interview consultants, small-business owners, teachers and parents who already run seasonal rhythms, formally or not. Right now Part III is argument without instances, and it will stay that way until somebody goes and asks.
+
+## Standing rules
+
+1. **No brain-state claims about seasons.** The metaphor is declared once in chapter 5 and stays a metaphor.
+2. **Meet the contested seasonality evidence in chapter 5**, before a skeptical reader can raise it.
+3. **Unromantic about the past.** Pre-industrial winters were hungry. The argument is about structure, not a lost golden age.
+4. **Northern temperate, and admit it.** The model dissolves at the equator and inverts south of it.

theory/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+# Theory
+
+The shared foundation. Both books and all six essays rest on these two files.
+
+| File | What it does |
+|---|---|
+| **`EVIDENCE.md`** | Every load-bearing claim sorted into four tiers, with sources. **Governs what may be asserted anywhere in the project.** |
+| `THEORY.md` | The Relevance Theory itself — the argument, narrowed to what the evidence supports, with the cut material and reasons at the end. |
+
+## The tiers
+
+| Tier | Meaning | How to write it |
+|---|---|---|
+| **A** | Well-supported, multiple sources | State it, cite it, move on |
+| **B** | Contested — real dispute in the literature | Present both sides *in the text* |
+| **C** | Plausible, untested — the author's hypothesis | Mark as hypothesis, in the text, every time |
+| **D** | Speculative or personal | Memoir or metaphor; cannot carry an argument |
+
+**The failure mode this exists to prevent is a Tier C claim written in a Tier A voice.** The original contribution — the three-distance relevance model — is Tier C in its entirety. Saying so plainly, in the text, is what makes the rest of the book believable.
+
+## Two things in `EVIDENCE.md` worth knowing without opening it
+
+**There is an internal contradiction that has to be resolved before drafting.** The theory treats default-mode activity as the thing modern life starves us of, and therefore good. But mind-wandering predicts *lower* momentary happiness (Killingsworth & Gilbert 2010), rumination is default-mode-linked, and the best experiment in the literature (Bratman 2015) found nature helping by *quieting* self-referential thought. "We need more reflection" and "nature helps by reducing it" cannot both stand. The resolution — that the target is flexibility, not more of either mode — is chapter 7's job in Book One.
+
+**Several claims were cut and should not creep back.** The foreign-policy argument, the weight-loss protocol, the diagnostic test's numeric scoring, the "I"/"me" labels for the networks, and the seasonal network mapping. Each has its reason recorded at the end of `THEORY.md`. If one reappears in a draft, that draft has regressed.

theory/THEORY.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # The Relevance Theory
 
-*The theory behind the project, revised July 2026 to match what the evidence actually supports. The previous version is preserved at `archive/THEORY_v1.md`. Evidence tiers referenced throughout are defined in `EVIDENCE.md`.*
+*The theory behind the project, revised July 2026 to match what the evidence actually supports. The previous version is preserved at `../archive/THEORY_v1.md`. Evidence tiers referenced throughout are defined in `EVIDENCE.md`.*
 
 **Renamed** from "Cognitive Balance Theory." The old name described the wrong thing — the theory isn't about balancing two modes, it's about how the brain decides what deserves attention at all. The relevance-sorting claim is the original contribution; the network model is borrowed scaffolding.