Method

Clarity Board

A single sheet of paper, folded once, that holds a week. It is not software and there is nothing to install — the layout is the whole idea, and it exists because every app we tried grew a settings page before it grew useful.

The four boxes

Fold an A4 sheet once lengthways and once across. You get four boxes; each one holds a different kind of commitment, and keeping them physically separate is what stops the week collapsing into a single undifferentiated list.

Box	What goes in	Rule
Week	The one advancing goal	Written first, in a full sentence
Days	Three ranked items per day	Ranked, never renegotiated midweek
Floor	The minimum for a bad day	One line, must be finishable in an hour
Parking	Everything else that arrived	Reviewed Friday, mostly deleted

How a week runs

Friday afternoon, thirty minutes: look back at last week's sheet, count the genuinely open half-days on the calendar, write the advancing goal, then fill the day boxes for four days out of five. The fifth stays empty on purpose — see planning a week in thirty minutes for why the empty fifth is what makes the other four believable.

During the week, nothing gets added to the day boxes. New arrivals go to Parking, which is the mechanism that lets you say “noted” without saying “yes”. On Wednesday, two minutes: is the advancing goal moving? If not, rearrange while there is still week left.

Why paper

Paper has three properties that matter here. It cannot notify you. It has a fixed size, which enforces the cap on items far better than any setting. And it is visible without unlocking anything, so the plan sits in peripheral vision rather than behind three taps.

If you prefer a screen, the layout transfers to any plain text file. What does not transfer is the size constraint, so add it manually: if the file scrolls, the week is over-committed.

What it does not do

It does not track projects, store notes, or replace a shared calendar. It is a weekly commitment device, and it works because it is small. Notes live somewhere else — see reading notes you actually reuse.