Seven lessons working backwards from the moment a limit gave way to the hours before anyone asked, ending in one availability decided in writing.
You set the limit, you meant it, and you were the one who broke it. That sequence is worth reading backwards.
Almost nobody loses a boundary to an unreasonable request. The request that takes one apart is small, comes from someone whose regard you want, arrives framed as an exception, and has a genuine reason attached that you can hear and cannot dismiss. Ninety seconds later you have agreed, and the rest of the afternoon carries a low irritation with nowhere sensible to go. Nobody pushed. That is the part people leave out when they tell the story afterwards.
This course takes those ninety seconds seriously and then refuses to stay in them. Over seven lessons it runs the other way down the timeline: from the collapse itself, back to the plausible case that caused it, back to the hours of unclaimed time that had already made the afternoon cheap to give away, back to the difference between an answer you can read out and an answer you have to compose while somebody watches, and back at last to an arrangement of your own availability that was never actually chosen by anybody.
Along the way it describes what the research on boundaries genuinely establishes and what it does not. Separating your work from the rest of your life and blending them are two arrangements with different costs, rather than a healthy option and an unhealthy one, and nothing in these lessons will tell you which sort of person you are. There is no assessment here and nothing returns a verdict. What there is instead is precise vocabulary and a short piece of writing you do yourself.
It ends where the timeline ends, at the cheapest point on it. You will write one availability: a single slice of your time or attention, what happens inside it, what is lost when it goes, and the plausible request you already know is coming. Four lines, decided in private, before the next Thursday afternoon asks you a question.
The payoff is modest and worth having. When the request lands, you will be reading rather than writing. The answer takes about a second, sounds the same as it did last month, and leaves nothing behind it to resent.
People who hold their limits perfectly against absurd requests and lose them to reasonable ones.
Capable professionals whose evenings and weekends are technically free and never quite given to anything.
Anyone who has announced a boundary more than once and noticed that the announcement kept needing to be made again.
People who want the vocabulary before the confrontation. This course does not teach you to hold a limit while somebody pushes on it. It gets the decision made first, which is the part that has to exist before holding is even possible.
Take the lessons in order, because the course moves backwards in time and each one sits earlier than the last. The first lesson asks you to write down one specific occasion; every later lesson works back from it, so it is worth doing properly rather than from memory later. The writing at the end should be short. None of it is written for anybody but you.