Sometimes the best projects start with a simple frustration.
Recently, I was looking for a way to create and manage work schedules for a small team. The requirements seemed straightforward: a handful of employees, recurring weekly schedules, different work locations, printable plans, and a clear overview of who works when.
Yet every solution I found fell into one of three categories.
Too Complex
Many scheduling platforms are designed for large organizations. They include shift swapping, payroll integration, GPS tracking, mobile apps, HR modules, vacation management, reporting dashboards, and dozens of other features.
While impressive, they often feel overwhelming when all you really want is to create a clear work schedule.
Too Expensive
Subscription-based scheduling tools can become surprisingly costly. Paying monthly fees for a small team quickly adds up, especially when most of the available features are never used.
Too Basic
On the other end of the spectrum are spreadsheets and word processor documents.
They work, but only up to a point.
After a while, copying rows, adjusting colours, recalculating hours, and maintaining different versions becomes tedious. A simple change can require updates in multiple places, and the resulting schedules are often difficult to read at a glance.
A Different Approach
So I started building my own solution.
Not because the world desperately needs another scheduling tool, but because I wanted something that sits between those extremes.
A tool that focuses on one thing:
Managing employee schedules in a clear, visual, and uncomplicated way.
The idea is simple:
- Define employees
- Create recurring weekly schedules
- Assign work locations
- Calculate working hours automatically
- Print beautiful schedules
- View schedules as tables or visual timelines
No payroll system.
No HR suite.
No unnecessary complexity.
Just scheduling.
Designing for Clarity
One of the goals is to make schedules easier to understand.
Instead of forcing everything into a spreadsheet, the tool offers visual representations such as coloured timeline views. Different employees can have their own colours, making it possible to see coverage, overlaps, and workloads within seconds.
A schedule should not require detective work.
You should be able to open it and immediately understand what is happening.
What’s Next?
The project is still in development, but several ideas are already on the roadmap:
- Multiple work blocks per day
- Better visualisations and timeline views
- Multiple saved schedules
- Employee-only access links
- Password-protected administration
- Eventually, perhaps even a lightweight SaaS version
For now, though, the focus remains the same:
Building the scheduling tool I was looking for but couldn’t find.
Sometimes innovation isn’t about creating something entirely new.
Sometimes it’s about removing everything that gets in the way.