Kind-of-Lost

When I Work Alternative: A Free Scheduling Optimizer

Most people hunting for a When I Work alternative aren’t angry at the product — they’re doing per-user math. Multiply a monthly fee by every employee on the roster, add the time-tracking add-on, and a “cheap” tool quietly becomes a real line item. I’ve built scheduling optimization models for twenty-plus years, and my answer to that math is my free staff scheduling optimizer: it costs nothing, needs no account, and — unlike most scheduling apps — it actually builds the schedule instead of giving you a nicer grid to fill by hand.

How to Plan a Delivery Route (the Way a Solver Does It)

Ask ten small fleets how to plan a delivery route and nine will describe some version of the same ritual: a list of addresses, a map, and somebody’s gut feeling about which order “makes sense.” I’ve spent years building routing models for real operations, and the gap between a gut-feel route and an optimized one is rarely small — it’s usually measured in whole driver-hours per day. The good news: planning delivery routes properly is a repeatable process, and most of it isn’t even math. It’s preparation.

What Is VRP? The Vehicle Routing Problem, Explained

So what is VRP, exactly? It stands for the vehicle routing problem, and it’s the three-letter answer to a question every delivery operation asks itself before sunrise: which vehicle should visit which stops, and in what order? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as an operations research analyst building routing models for real fleets, and I still think VRP is the most practical piece of math most people have never heard of. If a truck brought you anything this week, a VRP solver (or a dispatcher sweating over a map) decided how it got there.

12-Hour Shift Schedule Template (Free & Editable)

If you have ever searched for a 12 hour shift schedule template, you already know the problem: the internet is full of pretty grids that show you what a rotation looks like, but almost none of them actually build a working schedule for your team, with your people, your coverage minimums, and your time-off requests. A static template is a picture of a schedule. What you usually need is the schedule itself. This post is the “start here” overview: what a 12-hour shift schedule is, the trade-off you are really signing up for, the named patterns worth knowing, and how to skip the download-and-fight-with-a-spreadsheet step entirely.

12-hour shift schedule basic 2-team coverage

I’m Shutting Down My Tradeline Store. Here’s Why.

I sold my last tradeline on October 29, 2025. A $139 order, one card, nothing remarkable about it. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last one — you never do.

The store has been sitting there ever since, quietly taking orders that don’t go through. So I’m closing it. Not the blog, not the posts — just the store. Here’s the whole reasoning, numbers included, because in all the time I’ve spent reading about this business I have never once seen anybody publish theirs.