When it's just you and a mate, scheduling is easy — you know where you're going tomorrow. But as your team grows past 5 people, scheduling becomes the single biggest operational challenge. Here's what works.
The Three Scheduling Mistakes Every Growing Business Makes
1. One Person Holds All the Knowledge
If your scheduling lives in one person's head (usually the owner), you have a single point of failure. When they're on holiday, ill, or just busy on a job, nobody knows who's going where.
2. Drive Time Is Ignored
A schedule that looks perfect on paper falls apart when you realise you've got a plumber driving from Croydon to Camden between an 8am and a 10am job. That's 90 minutes in London traffic. The second job starts late, the customer's unhappy, and the whole day cascades.
3. Skills Aren't Matched to Jobs
Not every engineer can do every job. Sending an apprentice to a complex commercial boiler installation, or sending your most senior engineer to change a tap washer, is poor resource allocation either way.
Practical Scheduling Rules
Cluster by Geography
Group jobs by area and assign each worker a geographic zone for the day. A plumber doing 4 jobs in the same postcode is far more productive than one zigzagging across the city.
Build in Buffer Time
A schedule with zero gaps between jobs is a schedule that's already running late. Build in 15–30 minutes between each job for overruns, traffic, and the inevitable "while you're here, could you also look at…"
Match Skills to Requirements
Tag each team member's qualifications and skills, then match jobs accordingly. Gas Safe certified? Gets the boiler jobs. Part P qualified? Gets the electrical work. IPAF ticket? Gets the high-access work.
Prioritise Urgent and Time-Sensitive Work
Emergency callouts, time-sensitive jobs (landlord gas safety certificates about to expire), and commercial SLA work should be scheduled first. Fill the gaps with routine maintenance and follow-ups.
Use Recurring Schedules for Service Contracts
If you have recurring service contracts (annual boiler servicing, quarterly fire alarm testing), schedule them in bulk at the start of each quarter. Don't wait until they're due and scramble.
The Technology That Helps
Spreadsheets and whiteboards work until they don't. Here's what technology should do for you:
- Drag-and-drop calendar: See all workers and jobs on one screen. Move jobs between workers with a drag.
- Skill matching: Automatically highlight when a worker doesn't have the right certifications for a job
- Travel time estimates: Show estimated drive time between consecutive jobs
- Customer notifications: Send automated "on my way" texts with live ETA links
- Recurring job automation: Set up recurring schedules that auto-create jobs
Gaffer's scheduling features handle all of this. The calendar shows your full team, colour-coded by trade, with drag-and-drop assignment. GPS vehicle tracking means you see where everyone is in real time, not where they said they'd be.
The Dispatcher Role
Once you hit 8–10 workers, consider a dedicated dispatcher — someone in the office whose job is managing the schedule. This frees your engineers to focus on the work and gives customers a single point of contact for scheduling queries.
A good dispatcher with the right software is worth 2–3 extra productive hours per worker per day. That's the difference between 4 jobs a day per worker and 5.
Measuring Scheduling Efficiency
Track these numbers weekly:
- Jobs per worker per day: Your productivity metric
- First-time fix rate: Percentage of jobs completed in one visit
- Average drive time between jobs: Should decrease as you cluster better
- Customer wait time: Time from booking to job completion
- Overtime hours: Rising overtime means you need more staff or better scheduling
Gaffer's dashboard shows these metrics automatically from your job and GPS data. No spreadsheets needed.