I've been managing my own chronic illness while working full-time, parenting solo, and running a small business. I'm also a corporate manager with over a decade of experience in media and technology, and I hold an MBA and PMP certification. I know how to build systems. And I know, personally, how badly most systems fail when your capacity is unpredictable.

What I kept finding was that productivity and life management advice was written for people with a reliable baseline — people who could assume tomorrow would look roughly like today. For those of us in the somewhat functional middle of chronic illness, that assumption doesn't hold. The advice wasn't wrong for its intended audience. It just wasn't written for ours.

The frameworks in this course come from years of figuring out what actually holds up — through flares, through hard stretches, through periods where the goal was genuinely just not letting everything fall apart. They're practical, low-overhead, and designed to work at 60% capacity, not 100%.

I also run SmallWorksCo, an Etsy shop specializing in printable tools for chronic illness management — the companion resources referenced throughout this course. You don't have to purchase, but if you want the pre-built systems, you can get them there. My work sits at the intersection of systems thinking, lived experience, and practical design for people whose lives don't fit the standard template.