How the shelf works

Three doors. We buy or try it ourselves. A reader suggests it and it survives our checks. Or it is so established in ADHD spaces that not carding it would be a gap, in which case the confidence line says exactly that. Whichever door a card came through, it gets the same stamp criteria, confidence line and dates.

Every card carries one: Owned and used (we live with it), Tested briefly (weeks, not months), Community-sourced (n=…) (built from a stated number of reports), or Listing-based check (built from the official store listing, pricing page, and support docs on the date shown, with no hands-on time claimed). No card pretends to more testing than it got, and a listing-based card never carries KEEP.

Gear cards: quarterly, for price band, availability, and model generation. Creator, podcast, and community cards: twice a year, for activity and cadence. App and service cards on the reading shelf: quarterly, against the official listing, because prices, platforms, and supported titles move. Every check updates the CHECKED stamp. A dead purchase link flips a card to RETURNED automatically with the reason "link rot" until a human re-checks it, usually within the week.

If a product built by our publisher ever appears in this catalog, the card carries a bordered box that says so, in Courier, where you cannot miss it. You should discount for bias anyway; the box exists so you know when to.

Featured is a placement on the page, not a stamp. A card shown in the Featured spot keeps the stamp, confidence line and dates it earned on its shelf, and Featured never changes a shortlist's order or a card's note.

Wrong price band, wrong claim, wrong stamp input: corrections are made at the scheduled re-check, or sooner when we find them, and logged with a new date on the card. Never silent.

Supplements and nootropics, permanently, at any commission. Stamps that were not earned under these rules. Clinic endorsements. If it preys on this audience, it does not get a card, it gets ignored.

Nine shelves: gear and gadgets, home and environment, planners and paper, browser extensions, newsletters and creators, podcasts and YouTube, communities and body doubling, services and coaching, and reading and audiobooks. The reading shelf opened on 2026-10-27; every card on it started at WORTH A LOOK.