# Planning your week

> Generate a week, regenerate it, and read the board's draft and published states.

The board shows your whole week at once, so you plan dinner as one decision instead of seven separate scrambles. This is how a week gets generated, how you read its state, and how to redraw it without losing the nights you already like.

![A seven-night board filling in one card at a time with a drafting progress banner.](https://forkboard.app/docs/board-week.svg)

*Seven nights, planned as one decision.*

## The seven-night board

Every board is a grid of seven dinners, Monday through Sunday. If you'd rather see the weekend first, set your week to start on Sunday and the board rotates to match — the plan stays anchored to the same Monday underneath, so nothing about the meals changes, only the order you read them in.

## Generate a week

1. Open the board for the current week. With nothing planned yet, you'll see a 'Plan your week' empty state.
2. Click 'Generate this week'. Nothing fires on its own — generating always takes a deliberate click, so a plan is never drafted behind your back.
3. Watch the seven cards fill in one night at a time over a live connection. A banner counts them as they land, e.g. 'Drafting dinner 3 of 7'.
4. When the last night arrives, the full week is yours as a Draft, and the rating and swap controls on each card go live.

Generation is always pinned to the current week. You can step back through past weeks to read them, but you can't generate into a week other than this one.

## Draft and Published

A fresh week — and any week you've just regenerated or swapped a meal on — sits in Draft. The status pill in the top bar tells you where you stand: Draft until you choose to publish, then Published once you do. Regenerating a week that was already published quietly drops it back to Draft so a half-redrawn week never goes out by accident.

## Regenerate the whole week

1. On a board that already has a plan, click 'Regenerate week'.
2. The unpinned cards shimmer and then stream in as fresh meals, while any pinned nights are kept exactly as they were.
3. Forkboard plans the new nights around the ones you locked — varying the cuisines and chaining leftovers across the days it's free to move.

> Note: If all seven nights are pinned there's nothing left to redraw, so a regenerate is turned away until you unpin a day.

Each whole-week generation counts as one against your monthly plan budget. If a generation fails or you stop it partway, the credit is refunded — it only costs a use when a week actually lands.

Related: [Swapping a single meal](https://forkboard.app/docs/swapping-a-meal.md) · [Effort levels & pinning days](https://forkboard.app/docs/effort-and-pinning.md)

Canonical page: https://forkboard.app/docs/planning-your-week