A sample plan

See one before you buy one.

Describing a plan only gets you so far, so here is a whole one. It is invented from start to finish, and nobody in it is real. Yours would be built from your own answers and would read nothing like this. It only shares the five parts.

Example only. An invented client, written to show the shape of a plan.

Your reset plan · example

When the job ends and the days are suddenly yours.

Situation A job that ended after eleven years Time given Two or three hours a week Length Five parts · four weeks

i
What’s actually going on
“The problem isn’t that you have too much time. It’s that nothing in your week currently asks anything of you.”
ii
What not to do yet
Don’t rewrite the CV yet. Don’t fill the calendar to feel useful. Don’t clear the loft.
iii
Four weeks, one focus each
Week one: put one fixed point back in the week. About two hours.
iv
A shape for the day
Three anchors, wide apart. Out of the house before ten, for twenty minutes.
v
One thing to hold onto
“You are not without a direction. You are between two of them.”

Read the whole example planClose the example plan

What’s actually going on

You wrote that you have “nothing but time now” and that you can’t seem to use any of it. Those two things are in the same sentence for a reason, and it isn’t laziness.

For eleven years something else decided what your day looked like. The structure came from outside you and you built everything around it: when you ate, when you saw people, what you thought about in the shower. When the job went, the structure went with it. What’s left isn’t freedom yet. It’s an absence with the same shape as the thing that was there.

Underneath that is the bit you wrote around rather than said: you’re not sure who you are on a Tuesday afternoon without a reason to be somewhere. You mentioned the garden three times and each time you followed it with something dismissive (only the garden, just pottering). That’s the only thing in your answers you did that to.

The problem isn’t that you have too much time. It’s that nothing in your week currently asks anything of you, and a person who isn’t asked for anything slowly stops offering.

The energy is real and it is low, and it is worth saying plainly that this is a normal response to what happened rather than a character failure. Nothing below assumes you will feel more capable than you do now. If a week comes when you can’t, that’s accounted for in part five.

ii.

What not to do yet

These are the things you’d be forgiven for starting this week, and each of them would set you back. Not forever, just not yet.

Don’t rewrite the CV yet. You’ve opened it four times and closed it four times, which tells you it isn’t a document problem. You can’t describe what you want next because you haven’t worked it out, and a CV written from that place reads like an apology. It takes an afternoon once you know. It takes months if you don’t.
Don’t fill the calendar to feel useful. Volunteering, a course, a committee. All good things later. Right now each would be a new outside structure standing in for the old one, which is the thing that just proved it can be taken away.
Don’t clear the loft. You listed it and you’ve listed it before. Big shapeless jobs are what we reach for when we want to feel productive without deciding anything. It will still be there in spring.
Don’t make any financial decisions before week four. Nothing you described is urgent. Decisions made in the first months after a job ends are made by a version of you who is still absorbing the news.

iii.

Four weeks, one focus each

Built for two to three hours a week, which is what you said you had. Each week has one job. If you do only the first item in any week, that week has worked.

Week one Put one fixed point back in the week

Not a routine. One thing, at a set time, that happens whether or not you feel like it, so the week has a shape to hang off.

Choose a Wednesday morning thing. Outside the house, roughly two hours, same time each week: the swimming pool, the allotment, a market, a library.
Put it in the calendar four times, not once. Repeating it is the point.
Go the first time even if it’s raining and you’d rather not. Only the first one is hard in that particular way.

About two hours

Week two Say the garden thing out loud

You mentioned it three times and dismissed it three times. That’s worth twenty minutes of honest attention before you decide it’s nothing.

Write half a page answering one question: if the garden were allowed to be a real thing rather than pottering, what would that look like in a year? Nobody reads it. Be specific rather than sensible.
Then tell one person, out loud, to their face. Not to ask permission, just to hear yourself say it without the word only in front of it.

Under an hour

Week three One conversation with someone who does it

Not networking, and not asking for anything. One person who spends their week the way that half-page described, asked what it’s actually like.

Find one person: a local grower, a smallholder, someone who runs the allotment association. One message, three sentences, no CV attached.
Ask what the worst month is. People tell you the truth when you ask about the worst month.
If nobody answers, that’s a normal outcome and not a verdict. Send a second message to someone else and move on.

About an hour, spread out

Week four Decide the next four weeks, small

Not a career decision. Just the next four weeks, chosen by you rather than arrived at.

Read back the half-page from week two alongside whatever week three turned up. Notice which parts you still mean.
Pick one thing to spend the next month on. Write it in one sentence.
Now open the CV, if the sentence points that way. It will take an afternoon, because you’ll know what it’s for.

Ninety minutes

iv.

A shape for the day

Not a schedule, and not a morning routine. Three anchors, wide apart, with nothing prescribed between them. The gaps are deliberate: a day with three fixed points already feels different from a day with none, and filling the rest is what makes people abandon these by Thursday.

Before ten: Out of the house for twenty minutes, before the day has been decided. The shop, the block, the end of the road and back. This is the one that matters most, and it is the smallest.
Around one: A proper meal, sitting down, not at a screen. You mentioned eating standing up. It is a small thing that quietly tells you how much the day is worth.
Late afternoon: The hour that’s currently hardest. Put something in it that has a beginning and an end: a job in the garden, a chapter, one drawer. Finishing something is what the day is short of.
Not in the shape: Job sites, LinkedIn, the news. Once a day if you must, at a time you choose. Not first thing and not last thing.

One thing to hold onto

There will be a week in this, probably the third, where none of it happens and you conclude the whole thing was optimistic. That week is in the plan. It is not the plan failing.

When it comes, don’t restart from week one. Go back to the single fixed point from week one and do only that, for as long as you need, and let the rest wait. The structure is the thing that matters; what fills the weeks can change.

You are not without a direction. You are between two of them, and that gap has a length. It is not the new permanent condition.

How this plan was made. Your eight answers were read by me first, before anything was drafted. They were then sent to an AI model, under my instruction and using a structure I wrote, which drafted a reading of your situation and a plan. I corrected the reading, then read and edited every line of the plan. Nothing reached you that I hadn’t been through, and your answers were never used to train anyone’s AI system.

If it isn’t right. Reply within seven days and tell me what’s off, and I’ll rework it.

— Melisa

Two examples

Two people. Two very different plans.

Dana

Fourteen months after caring for her mum

“The bed was a rental and I need to call the company to come get it. I have looked up the number probably ten times.”

What her plan did

Named why one phone call had been so hard: returning the bed was the last thing left to do for her mum.
Week one was only that call, with a friend sitting beside her. Nothing else.
Then the room, then the money, then dinner at the table again, one focus a week.
Warned her that a cleared room can feel flat rather than lighter, and that this is normal.

Kerry

Full-time job, the kids Thursday to Sunday

“The post. There’s a pile behind the door I just step over.”

What her plan did

Kerry answered four questions in a few words each. The plan was built for almost no time: twenty minutes, once or twice a week.
One focus only, the post. Nothing about the flat, and nothing from Thursday to Sunday.
Week one: sort the pile into bin, keep, needs doing, then stop.
Anything urgent, like a final demand, goes to the top, with free debt advice named.

These are illustrative examples, not real clients. Dana and Kerry were invented to test the service before launch. The plans described here are what the service produced for them. A real client’s story will never appear on this site.

Where the human sits

A machine helps draft it.
A person decides what you get.

You should know exactly how your plan is made, so here it is plainly. Three steps — and only the middle one is touched by a computer.

Me · first

Your answers are read by a person

Nothing is automated at this stage. I read what you’ve written to check that Unstuck is the right response to it at all — and if it isn’t, you get told that and refunded, not sold a document.

The system

A first draft is built

Your answers are then sent to an AI model, under my instruction and using a structure I wrote, which produces a reading of your situation and a draft plan. This is the step that saves the hours — and it’s why this costs what it costs instead of several hundred dollars more.

Me · every plan

I read and edit every line

Every plan. That step is the point of the service, not a formality. I cut what’s generic, correct what’s wrong, add what the form couldn’t have known to ask, and rewrite anything that doesn’t sound like it was written to a person. If a draft isn’t good enough, it doesn’t get sent — it gets rewritten.

Your answers are not training data. They are processed as an instruction to the model, not as material to learn from, and are not used to train or improve anyone’s AI system. What you write is used to make your plan, and for nothing else.

Why I’m telling you this. Plenty of services use AI and don’t mention it. I’d rather you knew now than found out later — and in truth the disclosure is the proposition: the drafting is fast, the judgement is mine, and the judgement is what you’re paying for.

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and start moving?

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Questions first? Email hello@unstuck.me.uk