Don’t Show Weekends on Your Schedule!

Take the Weekends Out of Your Schedule

Here’s the deal. My admonition today is simple. Do not show weekends on the schedule. When I was first coming up in construction, I was taught to do three-week schedules at Hensel Phelps, with both Saturday and Sunday shown. All of the activity descriptions were way over to the left, and all you had were little boxes or X’s inside the grid.

Short answer: Leave Saturdays and Sundays off your three-week and Takt schedules. Weekends clutter the schedule, make activities harder to move, hide the flow of work, and look like a buffer when they are not, because only about a quarter of the crew comes in on a Saturday. Put buffers in the weekday sequence instead, and put each activity name right next to its X’s or boxes.

I quickly realized that if you remove the weekends, and you put the activity name right next to the X’s or boxes, you have a much easier experience in Excel. I have talked to you about this before, but sometimes customers and clients add the weekends back in. I believe that is a mistake, and here is why.

The Schedule Gets Cluttered

First and foremost, showing weekends clutters the schedule. It makes it harder to read, and it breaks your focus when you are looking at the flow of work. I do not want to see the weekends. I want to see the flow of work.

It also gets harder to work with. If you are moving things around in Excel or another program, it becomes quite difficult to find your rhythm and fall into Takt time, because you are always visually interrupted by the weekends. From a logistics standpoint, once you move an activity, you have to move half the activity, then the other half, and align it. It is really a nightmare, and it takes a whole lot longer.

Weekends Give a False Sense of Hope

When we look at Saturday or Sunday on a schedule, it feels like there is a buffer there. There really is not. One of the things I want to convince people of, with love or otherwise, is that you cannot do more than your resources will allow. Let me say that again. You cannot do more than your resources will allow.

At least in the US, only about twenty-five percent of your people will come in on Saturday. They will be fatigued, and they will want to go home, and they are not working enough hours past setup and breakdown to make a difference anyway. You can run people into the ground and take them from their families, and you can start a chain reaction that hurts families at home. But you will not gain much from overtime or Saturday work.

So it gives a false sense of hope. You should not plan on it, and you should not use it as a buffer. Do not assume your Saturdays are buffers. Here is what Saturdays really are.

• Saturdays are an emergency.
• Saturdays are eating into people’s time.
• Saturdays are using up people and their families.
• Saturdays are signing up the worker, his or her spouse, and their kids.
• Saturdays are nonproductive.

You should have buffers in the actual sequence in the week. I know a lot of owners are not allowing that, and I hope that changes. But that is how it should be. The buffers should be in the sequence, not in the weekends, because otherwise you are overburdening the crew. Buffers should be taken from the schedule and not the person.

It Is Harder to See Flow

Like I said before, when you have weekends in, you are looking at a broken up schedule with interruptions. Would you want your heart doctor looking at your heart monitor, trying to detect patterns during surgery or an EKG, with little pauses in between so they could not see the pattern? You would not want that. Leave the weekends out. It is harder to see flow with them in.

Weekends Lock You Into Weeks Instead of Takt Time

When you show weekends, we tend to work in week time frames instead of Takt times. Everyone automatically thinks the time intervals for Takt time should be in weeks, and for the Takt system, that is the worst thing you can do. Please do not show the weekends and get people locked into a a five-day Takt time where the drumbeat is the weekends.

A Summary of the Reasons

Those are the main reasons. It is a pretty good case, and we just need to get this done.

• Weekends clutter the schedule and make it harder to move things around.
• They give a false sense of hope, because Saturdays are not a real buffer.
• They make it harder to see flow.
• They lock people into week time frames instead of Takt times.

Please take them out. Please experiment. Put the activity name next to the X’s or the boxes or the highlights, and I promise you will find your experience much more rewarding.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

So here is the challenge. Take your weekends out of the schedule this week, and put the activity names right next to the X’s or boxes.

Bottom line: Buffers should be taken from the schedule and not the person.

On we go.

FAQ

Why does Jason say not to show weekends on a schedule?

Weekends clutter the schedule, make it harder to move activities and find your rhythm in Excel, give a false sense of a buffer, make flow harder to see, and lock people into week time frames instead of Takt times.

Why shouldn’t Saturdays be treated as a buffer?

Because you cannot do more than your resources will allow. In Jason’s experience, only about twenty-five percent of people come in on Saturday in the US, they are fatigued, and it takes time from workers and their families without making much difference.

Where should buffers go instead?

In the actual sequence during the week. Buffers should be taken from the schedule and not the person.

What is the heart monitor analogy?

A doctor would not want pauses in the monitor that make it hard to see the pattern. In the same way, weekends interrupt the schedule and make it harder to see the flow of work.

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Want your team trained on this? See our Last Planner System and Takt training.