technical help needed: how does work scheduling / planning works for your communities? Any program ideas?

[juchu]

I need your help ! I am in charge of organizing in our monastery the daily work. Up to now everything has been done by pencil and paper ( I started to put all of it in excel when i took over this job last year and make it clearer...This has already helped me a lot ) but I am wondering that there should be a possibility to get all this done easier... to keep track of absences, who is doing what, etc.

Excel is great, but i still have to do a lot of things manually. (And to remember doing them!)

I have to plan several areas (kitchen, laundry, garden, cleaning guest room teams) with several people (sisters, postulants, volunteers). All in all i have about a "workforce" of 25 people to manage to whom i have to tell every week what to do.

My "dream" would be to have one big list in which i type what which person is doing (p.ex. sister ABC does on friday morning laundry and in the afternoon kitchen) and that list would be able to create automatically several other lists (one weekly list for the kitchen / laundry / etc. and one for Sister ABC.

Is this just a dream or is there somewhere a program (that runs on mac) that makes this possible? I guess it should be somehow possible with excel, but I am really just a self-learner.... I checked on planing and scheduling programs online, but no one really seems to fit our needs exactly and the choice is just overwhelming.

I was thinking to ask here, since a lot of you work in volunteer organisations, small companies, church organizations.... how do you do your planning ?

It would help me a lot to hear others  experiences!

[vee]

One idea is a spreadsheet broken down into sections and colour coded. Names go in groups down the side. By groups I mean starting with say the most senior at the top and ending with volunteers at the bottom. Within that you could have sections for kitchen garden etc, or forget seniority and just have the job sections. Then across the top you have your week days. Where that persons name and week days coincide you put a colour corresponding to their job that day like green is gardens blue is whatever.  Hopefully I explained it well and it might help!

[sr.christinaosf]

In Excel you can create different tabs for different things, and even sort by row or column.  I'd really recomend it.  I could help set up a spreadsheet.  I'm not MAC savvy so I'd do it on a PC.