3 Best Methods for Creating a Work Schedule Calendar

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Introduction

Project scheduling software can do wonders for your employee scheduling practices, allowing for an increase in revenue, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

As many managers know, creating an employee work schedule can be challenging, but most have determined special hacks to make the process appear a bit more seamless. Fortunately, technology is now paving the way to evolve the scheduling process, making this dreaded task easier to complete.

The process of building a project schedule calendar can be very time-consuming and unpredictable meaning incidents can occur while you're in the process of completing the latest week's schedule.

How do you proceed with making the necessary changes?

Provided are the best three methods to creating a project schedule calendar for your employees.

One - Excel or Google Sheets

The main advantage of this project scheduling software is that it's the main application in this field. Everyone's heard of it and it's very likely that everyone knows how to work with it.

Excel also has prebuilt templates, which include a project calendar template. You can save a lot of time by just using this ready-made template instead of creating one from scratch. And since your team most likely knows how to use Excel, there's no learning curve, and that saves a lot of time.

How to create a project calendar Excel project

  1. Open Excel and go to New > Search for calendar, now you can see all calendar templates. You can choose any one of these that you like. One of the better ones is Seasonal Photo Calendar.
  2. After choosing your template, click Create
  3. Depending on which template you choose, you might have to change the year on the calendar.
While editing an Excel file might be easy and also easy to learn, everyone who's working on the file must work on a separate version. If multiple people save the same file, only the changes from the last person who saved it will be kept, everything else will be gone. There's a process here in uploading and reorganizing the changes into one file which can be time-consuming.

Even though creating a project schedule calendar in Excel might seem easy, there are some critical disadvantages. For example, you can't know who exactly accessed the file. But most importantly, you can't be completely sure that the version you have is the latest one, and this can cause problems.

Two - Google Calendar

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Google Calendar is an online solution to your project management problems. The best thing about it is that multiple people can work on the same calendar in real-time and all the changes will take effect at the same instant they're made.

The flexibility of Google Calendar allows you to have multiple calendars and view them at the same time. There are two ways to organize your calendars

  1. By team member You can create a separate calendar for each member of your team and put their deadlines on a personal calendar. Managers can then look into members' calendars and see which deadlines are nearing.
  2. By project You can create a new calendar for each separate team project and enter the task deadlines along with project milestones. This way you can compare timelines between different projects and determine if some work should be moved around to make space for high-priority tasks.
Google Calendar is a more modern tool that can be used as project scheduling software, however, it's still mostly used to only schedule meetings and limiting personalization to add additional projects and tasks.

Three - Dedicated Tools

While Excel and Google Calendars are nice and modernized tools, they weren't created for the sole purpose of project management. Dedicated project scheduling software exists, and it was created for this reason only.

Dedicated software can provide you with a much better way to collaboratively schedule and plan projects, connect launch dates and more.

Scheduled tasks can be viewed by day, week, month or year. The tasks contain all the necessary information and possibly even files and messages very easy to sort through.

Making changes is easy make a change and all dependent tasks will update automatically. It really makes life much easier.

Calendars are also sharable so you or another team can view each other's work and make sure you're working properly. It makes it really easy to align yourself properly with another team and not create a mess of it all.

The Takeaway

Starting with Excel, moving to Google Calendar and dedicated project scheduling software. We've covered a lot of good tools that you can work with. Perhaps you'd like to start with something you're more familiar with, like Excel and move your way up from there.

But that won't be so easy. Moving all your work is hard, so it's best to choose one method and keep working with it. With dedicated software available to ease your project scheduling process, utilizing automated tools may be your best option.

Most importantly, choose a tool that fits you and your team's needs.

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