Resources · Guide · 6 min
Where Sunday night goes: we timed 40 managers writing a rota
The feature list never tells a manager how long the rota will take. So we sat with 40 of them, stopwatch in hand, before and after they switched.
Every rota product has the same feature list: drag and drop, templates, notifications, a mobile app. None of it tells a café or clinic manager the one thing they want to know before they switch — how long Sunday night will take from now on.
So we measured it. Over the spring we sat with 40 managers, from a six-person bakery to an 84-person restaurant group, and timed them writing a real week: first the way they already did it, then again after a month on Midshift.
The headline number
For a single site of around 20 people, the median time to produce a finished, published week went from 2 hours 50 minutes to 58 minutes. That includes reading the week’s holiday requests, moving shifts because of them, and sending the rota to everybody.
On the smallest sites — under ten people copying a normal week — publishing took a median of nine minutes.
Where the time actually goes
The split before switching was consistent, and it was not where we expected:
- About 20% laying out shifts,
- About 30% checking availability against what people had asked for,
- About 50% re-reading the finished week to be sure nothing was uncovered or double-booked.
The first part is what every product optimises. The third takes the longest, and it is a reading problem rather than a typing problem. That is why Midshift draws cover gaps and clashes on the rota itself: an empty Friday close is something you should see without adding anything up.
What happens after the rota is published
The rota is not the only time sink. Each person on the team cost their manager about five minutes a week in “what time am I on?” messages, swap negotiations and availability chasing. For a 25-person team that is two hours a week that never appears on a timesheet.
And every location added about forty minutes a week at payroll time, reconciling sign-in sheets against the rota. Those three numbers — two thirds of rota time, five minutes a person, forty minutes a site — are the weights inside our hours-saved calculator.
The number we will not publish
We are often asked for a single percentage: “cuts scheduling time by 80%”. We do not have an honest one. It depends on what you do today, and some of the managers we timed were working from a paper grid and a phone tree that took five hours. Quoting that against nine minutes would be a marketing number, not a measurement.
Short answers
How long should a weekly rota take?
For a single site of around 20 people, the managers we timed took a median of 2 hours 50 minutes on spreadsheets and 58 minutes once they had switched, including handling holiday requests.
What takes longest when writing a rota?
Checking the finished week for gaps and clashes. It took roughly half the total time on spreadsheets, because it is a reading problem rather than a typing problem.
