staff scheduling Archives

How to Make an Employee Schedule in Google Sheets

If you search how to make an employee schedule in Google Sheets, you’ll find a hundred templates: names down the side, dates across the top, colored cells. That works fine for a small team on weekdays. It falls apart the moment you run 24/7, with nights, rest rules and people who can’t work certain days. Now you’re counting cells by hand at 11 PM. So I built a free Google Sheets add-on, Shift Optimizer, that fills the schedule for you with a real optimization solver, right inside your sheet.

Below: the manual way first (it’s worth knowing, and for some teams it’s all you need), then the add-on, how I built it, how it’s going so far, and what’s next.

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AI Staff Scheduling in Claude: A Free Solver Connector

Most “AI staff scheduling” tools I tried do one of two things: they let a chatbot write a schedule that looks right and quietly breaks your rules, or they put a little AI button on top of a calendar you still fill in by hand. I wanted the opposite: you describe your team to an AI assistant in plain words, and a real optimization solver builds the roster, with the rules treated as rules. So I built a free connector for Claude that does exactly that. It’s called Shift Scheduler, there’s no signup, and it has been in the Claude directory since late September.

This post covers how to use it, how I built it (and what I broke along the way), what the first month of use looks like, and what I’m changing next.

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My Solver Said Optimal. Two Shifts Were Empty.

A solver status of optimal is a statement about a tolerance, not about your business rule.

A test suite told me my scheduler was broken. It wasn’t. What actually happened is stranger and more useful: on one of the shipped sample rosters my solver said optimal and handed back a schedule with two night posts nobody was assigned to. Not a crash, not an infeasibility, not a timeout. A clean optimal, with holes in it. Here is what I measured, what I had wrong in my own code comments, and the one dependency I had been describing to people as a speed optimization when it is really a correctness one.

What Is a 4 on 4 off Schedule? (Free Builder)

The 4 on 4 off schedule is the easiest rotating shift pattern there is to explain to a new hire: work four consecutive shifts, then get four consecutive days off, on an 8-day cycle that just keeps repeating. No block-counting, no mid-cycle exception, nothing to memorize. The trade-off is what it does to the calendar — and that trade-off is the part most explanations of this pattern skip.

Line chart showing the start day of each 4-on-4-off work block drifting one weekday later every 8-day cycle, from Monday back to Monday after 8 cycles — Eight cycles, eight weekdays, back to Monday — the calendar cost of an 8-day pattern in a 7-day week.

Free Rota Planner (No Signup Required)

If you searched for a rota planner rather than a “scheduler,” you’re probably in the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand — Commonwealth English keeps “rota” and “roster” for the same thing American software calls a schedule. The vocabulary is different; the underlying problem, for a 24/7 team, is identical: cover every shift, honour rest between shifts, and don’t leave one person doing all the nights. This is a free rota planner built around a real solver rather than a grid you fill in by hand, and it makes no assumption about which side of the Atlantic you’re on.

Bar chart: days until a rota pattern repeats on the same weekdays - DuPont 28, Panama and Pitman 14, 4-on-4-off fixed 56, 4-on-4-off rotating 112 — Every named rota pattern eventually lands back on the weekdays it started on — some take a lot longer than others.