# THE DRIFT WATCH
:number VI
:accent #ffc400
:message Standing rules keep a solo founder honest when no one else will.
:epigraph This document is a tool for clarity — not a forcing function for monetization.
:drawn-from The founder's standing request · Monetization Roadmap · BulletSites · PTCHBL · RSLVBL · the library itself

## THESIS

A solo founder has no board, no cofounder, no skeptical colleague down the hall — nobody whose job is to say *that number is a wish, not a fact.* The source library's answer is to build the skeptic in writing. Standing, self-authored rules, kept where they will be re-read, applied to the author by the author's own documents.

The canonical rule set is short enough to memorize. The founder's standing request, recorded in his own memory system and reproduced in the library, reads: track when ideas get mixed up between projects; when scope creeps beyond what can be shipped; when sales urgency inflates asset valuations into expectations rather than possibilities. And then the two load-bearing sentences: *Financial situation is stable. The work itself is the goal.* Do not let chasing hypothetical sales replace building as the source of meaning. [OBSERVED]

Read that as engineering, not affirmation. It names the three failure modes of a many-project portfolio — cross-contamination, scope drift, valuation drift — and it pins the one fact that makes patience rational: the bills are paid, so no decision needs to be made from imagined urgency. A founder who writes down *why* he can afford to be honest has removed the usual reason not to be.

The rest of the volume is the rule set in action: a monetization document that ranks by distance-to-revenue instead of by hope, manuals that locate their own bottleneck in one sentence, and the self-diagnosis that reframes an entire portfolio in four words. The watch is not a mood. It is instrumentation.

[[figure:drift-gauge]]


## CONTEXT — HOW TO READ THIS VOLUME

The library closes where governance actually lives for a team of one: in standing rules written by the calm version of the author to bind the tempted version. Volume I gave the ladder, II the floor, III the boundary, IV the voice, V the handover. None of them hold without something that notices when they start to slip.

The exhibits are ordinary operating documents — a revenue ranking, two owner's manuals, a line of front matter — chosen because they are the places where drift shows up first. Money invites inflation, features invite avoidance, and portfolios invite the quiet substitution of the pleasant project for the necessary one.

Read the rules as instruments, not affirmations. Each one is falsifiable, re-read on a schedule, and applied to the author by his own documents. That is the entire mechanism: a solo operation cannot separate powers between people, so it separates them in time.

## EXHIBIT A — FIVE BUCKETS, NO WISHES
:source Monetization Roadmap

The portfolio's revenue document opens by declaring what it is not: not a feature list, not a wishlist — a ranking of which projects are closest to revenue and what it would take to unlock each. Five buckets: REVENUE-NOW (live or one config flag away), REVENUE-SOON (one to four weeks of focused work), REVENUE-MEDIUM (one to three months), REVENUE-LATER (real but deferred), and MOTHBALLED — reactivate or sunset. [OBSERVED]

Two disciplines hide in that taxonomy. First, the unit of ranking is *work remaining*, a falsifiable quantity, rather than market size, an imaginable one. Second, the bottom bucket exists at all — a revenue roadmap with a named mothball category is a document that has decided in advance it is allowed to say "not this one." The top bucket gets attention first; everything below is real but deferred, and *deferred* is written down so it cannot silently mean *pretended*.

## EXHIBIT B — THE BOTTLENECK, LOCATED IN ONE SENTENCE
:source BulletSites — Owner's Manual · PTCHBL — Founder's Owner's Manual

BulletSites, with its five orders and zero paid, concludes: distribution is the bottleneck, not product. [OBSERVED] PTCHBL — an accessibility platform with a working scanner, fix generation, widget delivery, and real usage numbers on the board — compresses its own strategic state into one line: a production-quality, distinctively-branded, pre-revenue platform that *needs distribution and a paid wedge, not more features.* [CONFIRMED / OBSERVED]

That sentence is drift-watch instrumentation at the project level. The builder's temptation, always, is to add features — building is the pleasant work, the thing already known how to do. The manual's job is to stand in the way of the pleasant answer: name the actual constraint, so that the next hour spent on features is at least *knowingly* spent on the wrong thing.

[[figure:standing-rules]]


## EXHIBIT C — THE FOUR-WORD SELF-DIAGNOSIS
:source About the author — the library's front matter

The library's own summary of its author, by the honest read of every manual in it: *building-unblocked and distribution-blocked.* The infrastructure exists, the audits exist, the licenses exist — and the customers do not yet exist in the numbers the infrastructure can support. Followed by the quiet punchline: he knows this; the library exists, in part, so that he keeps knowing it. [OBSERVED]

Note what the diagnosis is not. It is not self-flagellation — the building genuinely is unblocked, which most founders cannot claim. It is not denial — the blocked half is named without cushioning. A portfolio-level status, stated in four words, kept visible on purpose because the author knows which half he would prefer to forget. Every founder has a version of this sentence. The discipline is writing yours down where you cannot avoid re-reading it.

## EXHIBIT D — RULES THAT SURVIVE THEIR AUTHOR'S MOODS
:source RSLVBL — Master Owner's Manual · the truth ladder

The drift watch extends below strategy into operating policy. The discourse platform's simulated users run under an explicit, written activity ceiling — an average of well under one action per NPC per day, measured and reported against the policy. [CONFIRMED] The truth ladder of Volume I carries its own standing rule — claims move down, never up. The monetization buckets carry theirs — attention flows top-down.

The pattern across all of them: the rule is written *before* the situation that will test it, by the calm version of the author, to govern the tempted version. A solo operation cannot separate powers between people, so it separates them in time — past-you legislates, present-you executes, and the documents hold the line between the two. That is what a drift watch is: governance for a team of one.

## PRACTICE

**Write your standing rules — three is enough.** Name your personal failure modes the way the source names cross-contamination, scope creep, and valuation inflation. Put them in whatever you re-read weekly. Rules that live in your head are moods; rules that live in documents are policy.

**Pin the facts that license patience.** If the bills are paid, write it down, because every inflated projection begins by forgetting it. If they are not, write that down too — urgency you have measured is strategy; urgency you feel is drift.

**Rank projects by work-remaining, never by dream-size.** Distance to revenue is checkable; market size is imaginable. Keep a bucket explicitly named for mothballed, and let things actually live there.

**Locate each project's bottleneck in one sentence.** *Needs X, not more features* — force the sentence even when, especially when, X is the work you enjoy least. Review the sentences before allocating any week.

**Diagnose the portfolio in four words.** Blocked where, unblocked where. Keep it visible. The purpose of the diagnosis is not to fix it today; it is to make forgetting it impossible.

**Legislate calm, execute tempted.** Write ceilings, ladders, and priority rules before the situations that test them. When the tested moment comes, obey the document — you wrote it precisely because you knew this version of you would argue.

**Re-read the last two sentences of the standing request.** The work itself is the goal. A portfolio built from that sentence can afford every other discipline in this library; a portfolio built against it cannot afford any of them.

## CODA — ONE VOLUME LEFT

Six volumes of discipline end here: label your claims, own your floor, ship sealed artifacts, let the work carry taste, write for the stranger who inherits it, and keep standing rules against your own drift. Every one of them is checkable, and every one is free.

What none of them answer is why to do any of it. That question belongs at the end, after the disciplines are in place, and it gets the last volume: **Volume VII — Build the Substrate**, on what a finished floor is actually for, why free was a structural decision rather than a generous one, and what one purchase and two shipments have to do with either.

*Continue to Volume VII.*
