Weeksort or a group chat
A chat is the fastest way to ask a question and the worst place to keep an answer. A schedule that lives in a thread has no current version at all, only a scroll.
What the group chat costs
Everything arrives in one stream, mixed in with everything else: a swap agreed between two people, a request for a day off, a photograph of the rota, and a joke. None of it is a record, so the schedule and the group slowly stop agreeing and neither of them is obviously wrong.
The answer to when do I work is a picture somebody posted, and finding the latest one means scrolling and then trusting that it was the latest. Anyone who was away from their phone for an evening has no way to tell what they missed.
The same week, both ways
| What happens in a week | In a group chat | In Weeksort |
|---|---|---|
| Two people agree to swap a shift | In a group chatIt is settled in the thread, three people read it, and the rota itself is never changed. | In WeeksortOne offers, the other accepts, a manager approves if the workplace wants them to, and the schedule is what changes. |
| A shift is added late on a Friday | In a group chatThe message lands under twenty others and the person it is about never sees it. | In WeeksortIt reaches the people whose shifts moved, in their own language, in an inbox that is only about their shifts. |
| Somebody cannot work next week | In a group chatIt is said once, in a thread, days before anybody sits down to build the week. | In WeeksortIt is filed against the week, on the slots they are eligible for, and it is in front of you while you build. |
| A person wants to know when they work | In a group chatThey scroll back for the last picture of the rota and hope it was the last one. | In WeeksortThey open their own shifts and see the published week, with nothing else in the way. |
| Somebody leaves the workplace | In a group chatThey stay in the group until somebody thinks to remove them. | In WeeksortThey stop being active, their upcoming slots are released, and the weeks they worked keep their name. |
What Weeksort does not do about it
It does not replace talking to your team and it has no chat in it. It is not a time clock and it does not calculate pay. What it holds is the schedule, the requests made about it, and a record of who was told what — the manager still decides every one of them.
The group stays, for conversation
Keep the group for the things a group is good at. What moves out of it is the schedule itself, the swap nobody could find again afterwards, and the change that had to reach one person and was sent to everybody.