How to plan a week's schedule in ten minutes

Planning a schedule feels like a big job because it is usually done from a blank page. A manager opens an empty week, tries to remember who works when, fits everyone in, then finds out on Monday that two people were on holiday. An hour has gone and the result still needs fixing.

Most weeks are not new. For a team with regular patterns, this week is last week with a handful of changes: someone is off, someone swapped a day, there is a delivery on Thursday. If you only spend time on the changes, ten minutes is realistic for a team of ten to twenty people at one location. Here is the routine, with a rough time for each step.

The ten minutes at a glance

1. Copy last week

Start by copying the previous week into the new one as drafts. A draft is visible to you and other planners but not to the team, so you can move things around freely without anyone getting a notification about a shift that will change again in five minutes.

If your pattern repeats over two weeks, with alternating weekends for example, copy from the matching week instead of the last one. If nothing ever changes, you can go a step further and have the schedule copied forward automatically, so this step is done before you sit down.

2. Deal with time off first

Approved time off is the most common reason a copied week is wrong, and it is the one that causes real trouble if you miss it, because you have scheduled someone who has been told they can be away. Look at it before anything else.

A schedule that shows approved time off on the same grid as the shifts makes this quick: you are looking for a shift sitting on a day marked as off. For each one, move the shift to someone else or leave it uncovered for now. Do not hunt for cover yet. Collect the gaps and fill them together in step four.

3. Apply this week's changes

Now make the changes you already know about. Keep a running note through the week of anything that affects the next schedule, so that this step is reading a list instead of searching your memory.

• Requests people made: a swapped day, a late start for an appointment.
• Things that change how many people you need: a delivery, an event, a seasonal rush, a quiet week.
• New starters who need to be paired with someone, and leavers who need to come off.

Saved shift templates for your usual patterns, such as Early 7:00 to 15:00 or Late 14:00 to 22:00, turn adding a shift into two taps instead of typing times.

4. Fill the gaps

By now you have a week that is mostly right, plus a few uncovered shifts. There are three ways to fill them, from most to least effort.

1. 1Assign someone yourself, if you know who is free and wants the hours.
2. 2Let the software propose it. In ClockinBee, Auto-schedule this week takes the days, the shift times and how many people each day needs, and adds shifts as drafts. People with the most contract hours left that week get shifts first, and nobody is given a shift on a day of approved time off or one that clashes with a shift they already have.
3. 3Publish what is left as open shifts. Anyone who works at that location and is free that day can take one from their phone.

5. Check, then publish

Before publishing, take one look at the week per person instead of per day. This is where the mistakes that cause complaints become visible.

• Hours against contract: is anyone well over or well under their usual hours?
• A late finish followed by an early start the next morning.
• The same people on every weekend or every late shift.
• Anyone scheduled at a location they do not normally work at.

Then publish. Everyone with a new or changed shift is told, and people who had no changes are left alone.

What makes it slow

If planning still takes an hour, the cause is usually one of these, and each has a fix outside the ten minutes.

• Time off arrives by message or in conversation, so you have to remember it. Have every request go through one place that shows on the schedule.
• You do not know who is available. Ask people to record the days they cannot work, once, instead of asking each week.
• Every week is rebuilt from nothing. Save the patterns you keep re-entering as templates.
• You publish late, so the week is full of last-minute swaps. Publishing earlier removes most of them.

Common questions