Schedule Tool

OK, this is a big deal to me. I've made an excel spreadsheet that has a copy of the weekly schedule (left side, and shown as the horizontal black bars on the right side), that I can copy back and forth to our bloated (too big to email) schedule program. I've also included staff's availability (which are the gray bars). The bars turn red when I've scheduled someone when they aren't available.

I can work on this at home where my monitor is big enough to view two views of the schedule and update the weekly while viewing the daily. But more importantly, UNINTERUPTED. My desk at work is between the breakroom and the bathrooms. I can't hide. There are a million (urgent, but not important) distractions ("Bruce, the fridge in the breakroom smells bad," "Bruce, we need more coat hangers, there are only wire ones," "Bruce, sorry I'm late but there was a pigeon on the bus. Will this count as an occurance?"). Our "Open Door" policy means I can't tell staff I'm busy, fuck off. (Someday, Bruce, someday...)

Also, it's not locked like our work schedule tool. I can easily make graphs that help show how hours are being distributed, or make other modifications that help me catch errors ("NO OVERTIME!"), and see where I can cut hours.

I've still got some ideas for making it more effective (linking to my hourly sales average database) and I've created a version for the cafe supervisor to do his own staff.

Then everything can get pasted back into our regular schedule, tweaked, and ready to go.

Now if I can only figure out my own schedule...