A working-week pattern (which weekdays a crew works) resolved per project, with the schedule doing its date arithmetic in working days. A builder types '5 days' and the system derives the calendar span that occupies — 5 calendar days from a Monday, 7 from a Thursday. Days nobody works are shaded on the chart.
Also called: weekends · working week · M-F · does the schedule count Saturdays · calendar days vs work days
Type five days and you get five days of work, not five days on a calendar
A five-day stage starting Thursday finishes the following Wednesday, because nobody is on site Saturday or Sunday. The schedule does its date arithmetic in the days your crew actually works and puts the bar where it belongs. Enter it as calendar days — which is what a spreadsheet does — and the finish date is wrong before the job has begun.
Days nobody works are shaded, so an impossible date looks impossible
Non-working days draw as bands behind the bars at day and week zoom, with Saturday and Sunday merged into one. A stage sitting on a shaded band is visibly wrong, which is what makes the schedule readable at a glance rather than something you audit stage by stage. At quarter and year zoom the shading drops away, where a weekend would be a sliver.
One weekend counted wrong does not drift the whole build
Stages chain, so a weekend counted as work near the start pushes everything after it. Six stages in, a build could drift by more than a week before anyone lifted a hammer — and the customer has already been given a completion date that was never possible. Counting in working days stops the drift at the source.
Your concrete sub works Saturdays; your framing crew doesn't
Set the working week once for the company, override it on the crew that works Saturdays, and override it again on the one rush job that has to run through a weekend. Each level shows the pattern it inherits, so “same as the company” has a visible consequence instead of something you go and look up. The last remaining day cannot be switched off — a crew that works no days cannot be scheduled at all.
A start date picked on a Saturday rolls to Monday, and says so
Picking a Saturday used to schedule a crew onto a Saturday. Now the date rolls forward to the next working day and the field tells you that it did. Chaining one stage onto the end of the one before it does the same.
- 1The pattern resolves most-specific-first: project override → crew override → company default → Mon-Fri
- 2calendarSpanFor(startDay, workDays, pattern) walks forward counting working days and returns the calendar span from the start to the last working day inclusive
- 3workDaysInSpan() does the inverse, so a bar that was dragged rather than typed can be described back in the number a human thinks in
- 4nextWorkingDay() rolls a start dropped on a non-working day forward, and is used when chaining a stage to the end of the one before it
- 5The stored `duration` on a task stays the CALENDAR span, unchanged, so every existing startDay + duration calculation in the chart keeps working
Stage lengths were counted in calendar days, so a five-day stage starting Thursday was scheduled to finish Monday — straight through a weekend nobody works. Because each stage starts when the last one ends, every later stage inherited the error, and a six-stage build had drifted more than a week before anyone lifted a hammer. Crews were told to show up on Saturdays that were never real, and customers were given completion dates the plan could not hit. Schedules are laid out on the working week the company actually keeps.
- Stage durations counted in calendar days producing impossible dates
- Chained stages compounding the weekend error across a whole build
- No way to say one crew works Saturdays and another doesn't
See it on your own jobs
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