Every system you have tried gave you one answer. One category, one style, one number. It was satisfying for a while. Then there were the parts of your life it didn't cover, and you assumed the fault was yours.
The number can also be one, and it can be none.
01
Why not force one
A single answer is tidy, and tidiness is not evidence.
The method's standard is the smallest number of explanations that account for the most evidence without forcing the evidence to fit. The last clause carries the weight. If one rule explains every scene, one is the answer. If it explains the work scenes and has nothing to say about the scenes at home, stretching it to cover them is forcing.
02
One example
Say some of your scenes share an order, at work and at home. You finish something large, feel flat by evening, and open the next thing the same day.
Candidates there might be Output, where the fear is that without achievement you don't matter, and Ahead, where the fear is that if you stop managing, something goes wrong again. When you finish something big, what shows up first: emptiness, or the next thing you should have already started? Emptiness is the Output answer. The next thing is the Ahead answer.
Other scenes share a different order, and they also come from more than one part of your life. Someone goes quiet, your partner or a colleague, and you can't settle until the quiet has been dealt with.
Candidates there might be Peace and Needed. Is it worse when they're upset with you, or when they don't need you? Upset is the Peace answer. Not needed is the Needed answer.
Suppose Ahead comes off the first set and Needed comes off the second, leaving Output and Peace. Making those into one would mean stretching Output over a silence it says nothing about, or stretching Peace over a finished project. Neither stretch has support. Two may be the smaller honest number.
03
The limit
This is not permission to collect.
Three or four at once may mean the descriptions are being read on the surface, where they overlap. The checks stay the same for every candidate: it has to explain scenes, across more than one part of life, and survive the question that separates it from its neighbor.
The count can also be zero. None of the nine may fit, and an ordinary explanation, such as a job that is too big or a hard year at home, may account for all of it. When the scenes don't settle the count, there is not enough to tell yet.
Subtraction is how the count gets made, by taking away and not by adding.
How to use the nine without choosing among them is on The Nine Rules as a Map, Not a Menu.
What a co-rule is
A co-rule is a second rule operating together with the first, and finding one is a result in its own right and not a failure to choose.