Five short lists, that is the whole system
The overview is not a calendar to fill or a form to complete. It is five short lists, written anywhere, answering one question: what is the week holding?
Fixed this week
The things with a time already attached:
An appointment · A work commitment · A school event · A delivery
Flexible this week
Needed, but movable within the week:
Laundry · Admin · Shopping · A phone call
Maybe / only if manageable
Wanted, and genuinely optional:
A social plan · An extra household task · An optional outing
Needs support
Where someone else is part of the plan:
Transport · Shopping · Childcare · An appointment companion
Can move
Already decided to be postponable, without renegotiation:
Non-urgent admin · An optional visit · A household job
Why seeing it together helps
Each item on its own looks small — a delivery on Tuesday, an appointment on Wednesday, a school thing on Thursday, a friend's birthday at the weekend. It is only when the week is laid out together that its actual shape appears. Seeing everything together can help reveal when several demands have landed close together. At that point something can be moved — not because the week failed, but because the pile-up was visible before it was lived.
The overview also shows the opposite: how much space the week actually has. Weeks that look full in the mind are sometimes mostly flexible, and knowing that makes the fixed parts easier to face.
What this is not
- Not a symptom tracker — nothing here asks how the week felt, only what it holds
- Not an energy or activity score — there is no number to keep up, which is deliberate
- Not a daily target or a streak — a week with two entries is not a lesser week
- Not a record to keep — the point is the glance, not the archive; a page that gets thrown away each Sunday has done its job
- Not mandatory — nothing is lost by skipping it, or by not filling it in every week
A blank week is still a valid week. Some weeks the overview's most useful entry is “nothing fixed — let this one be quiet”.
Keeping it alive without effort
- One place only — a whiteboard, one notebook page, the same screen each time
- A few minutes when it is noticed — a roughly right overview still helps; a beautiful, current one that costs an hour does not
- Written by whoever has the capacity — a supporter can hold the pen from dictation, or maintain it entirely, with permission
When a bad week makes even that unaffordable, the overview can simply pause — and be picked up again at the next quiet moment, without catching up on the gap.
At the severe end
For people with severe and very severe ME/CFS, the overview often becomes a coordination tool held by a supporter, with permission: care visits, appointments, deliveries and essential household needs, laid out so that the demanding parts don't land on the same day by accident — and so the quiet days stay quiet. The person the week belongs to remains the one who decides what counts as fixed, what can move, and what would be too much even once.