Home › Guides

Planning a week that survives Monday

Every trade business plans its week and every trade business watches it come apart, usually by Tuesday. That is not a planning failure. Emergencies are real, jobs overrun, parts do not arrive. The question is not how to make a plan that holds. It is how to see what moved, early enough to tell the person it moved onto.

The damage is the phone call you did not make

When a morning job runs to three o'clock, the cost is rarely the extra hours. It is the customer who took a day off work and sat in until five. That customer is lost as a recommendation and possibly as a customer, over something that would have cost one phone call at eleven — if anyone had known at eleven.

Two things make that call possible

• The engineer can say "this is going long" in two taps, without ringing the office and interrupting whoever is there.
• The office can see immediately what that pushes into, rather than working it out from a wall planner.

Neither is sophisticated. Both are impossible when the schedule lives in a group chat and a printed sheet.

Leave a gap on purpose

A week planned to a hundred per cent has no capacity for the thing that always happens. Firms that keep an afternoon a week genuinely free absorb emergencies without ruining the following day. It feels wasteful right up until the first week it saves, and it is much easier to defend when you can see how often it gets used.

Group by area, not by order of arrival

A day built in the order the calls came in is three trips across town. Grouping by postcode area is worth an hour a day per engineer, and an hour a day is a job a week. In the UK that means working with outward codes — the part before the space — because a British postcode is not a number and a range like "B1 to M1" is not an area.

Unassigned should be visible, not lost

The job nobody could fit in is the one that goes missing. If it sits in an unassigned column where everyone can see it, it gets placed on Thursday. If it went back into an inbox, it gets placed when the customer rings to ask what happened.

Look back at the week you had

Once a month, compare what was planned with what happened. Not to blame anyone — to find out how much of the week is genuinely unpredictable. Most firms discover it is less than they thought, and that the same two categories of work always overrun. That is an estimating problem wearing a scheduling costume; see what the job actually cost.