How to write your own functional record
Nobody has seen your kitchen at six in the evening. Here is how to write it down so that someone else can use it.
Two other articles on this site tell you to write down two weeks of ordinary days and hand it to your clinician. Neither explains how, which is not much use.
So here is the method. It costs nothing, you can start tonight, and it is the single most useful thing most people can do for their own file.
Why it matters that you write it
Your clinicians have seen you in a room, for twenty minutes at a time, on the days you were well enough to attend. They have never seen what happens when you get home.
That is not a criticism of them. It is a limit of the format. A clinician can assess, interpret and confirm an account of your daily life, but they cannot invent one they have never observed. If nobody supplies it, it does not enter the record.
You are the only person who can supply it.
What to record
Four things about each activity. Miss any one of them and the entry stops being useful.
What you did, or could not do. The specific task. Not "self-care" but "showered".
How it went. Whether you finished it, what help you needed, what you used to get through it, and how long it took.
How often this happens. Whether this is most days, some days, or a bad-week thing.
What it cost afterwards. What you could not do for the rest of that day or the next because you did this.
That last one is the part almost everybody leaves out, and it is often the most important. Being able to do something once tells a reader very little. Being able to do it at the price of the rest of the day tells them a great deal.
A worked example
Here is the same event recorded three ways.
Not useful:
Bad pain day. Struggled with everything.
True, and unusable. It describes a feeling, not an activity, and nobody can picture it.
Better:
Couldn't shower today. Pain too bad.
Now there is an activity. But there is no frequency, no detail, and no consequence.
Useful:
Tuesday. Showered, sitting on the shower stool. Took about 40 minutes. Needed help drying my feet and getting my socks on. Did not leave the house afterwards; spent the rest of the afternoon lying down. This is about three days in seven.
That third version is something a clinician can assess, and something a reader who has never met you can picture. It is not longer because it is more literary. It is longer because it contains four facts instead of one.
What to cover across a fortnight
Work through the ordinary business of a day rather than trying to describe your condition. A rough list to prompt you:
Getting up and getting ready. Showering, dressing, hair, teeth, shaving. What you do sitting down that you used to do standing.
Food. Shopping, carrying, standing to cook, cutting, lifting a pan, cleaning up. What you eat instead when you cannot do the thing you meant to.
The house. Laundry, changing sheets, vacuuming, bins, anything above shoulder height or below knee height.
Getting around. Stairs, distance walked, how long you can sit or stand, driving, public transport, whether you cancel things.
Managing yourself. Medications: remembering, ordering, taking them on time. Appointments: booking, remembering, getting there. Bills, forms, phone calls you have been putting off.
Other people. What you cancelled. What you attended and paid for afterwards. What somebody else now does for you that you used to do yourself.
Sleep and the shape of the day. When you sleep, how often you wake, and what time of day you are at your worst and your best.
The four mistakes
Recording only the bad days. Understandable, and it produces a record that looks unrepresentative and can be dismissed as such. Write the ordinary days too. The contrast is the evidence.
Recording only the good days. The opposite failure, and it comes from a decent instinct: not wanting to seem dramatic. If your fortnight happens to be a good one, say so and note what a bad week looks like separately.
Describing feelings instead of actions. "Felt awful" cannot be assessed. "Could not stand long enough to cook, ate toast instead" can.
Leaving out what someone else does. If your partner has quietly taken over the shopping, the bins and the medication chart, that is not a domestic arrangement. It is a support need that nobody has written down, and it disappears from the record precisely because it is being met.
Practical matters
A fortnight is enough. Long enough to catch variation, short enough to finish. If you can only manage a week, do a week.
Keep it short. Three or four lines a day. This should take five minutes, not an hour. A record you abandon on day four is worth less than a rough one you finish.
Write it the same day. Not at the end of the week. You will not remember Tuesday accurately on Sunday, and the small things go first.
Use whatever is to hand. A notebook, the notes app, voice memos, a shared document your partner adds to. Nobody cares about the format.
Have someone else read it. The person who lives with you will notice things you have stopped seeing, because you adapted to them years ago.
Date it. A dated record made at the time carries more weight than a summary written afterwards, and it is worth being able to say when it was written.
What to do with it
Give it to whoever is writing about you. Send it to your GP before the appointment rather than handing it over during. Give it to any clinician doing a functional assessment. Keep a copy.
It is not a submission and it does not go anywhere official on its own. It is raw material: the thing every other document should have been built from, and usually was not.
If you have been asked for evidence about how your condition affects your daily life, and you have never written any of this down, this is where it starts.
Observations drawn from published Tribunal and Court reasons, current as at the compilations cited. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here predicts an outcome. Every file turns on its own facts.