Shift-Work Planner

What it will organise

The controllable parts of a schedule you do not control: where the main sleep opportunity sits for each shift in your pattern, where a nap helps and where it works against you, when to seek light and when to keep it low, and where a caffeine cutoff falls relative to the end of your shift rather than to a clock hour.

Transition days — the ones between shift types, which are usually the hardest — will be planned explicitly rather than left as a gap between two plans.

What it will ask you for

• Your rota: the shifts themselves, their direction of rotation, and how much notice you get.
• Your commute, in both directions.
• Your commitments on days off.
• How much control you actually have over when you can sleep, including whether you can darken a room during the day.

The planner assumes you cannot change the rota. Most advice written for shift workers quietly assumes you can, which is why so much of it is unusable.

The assumptions it will rest on

1. The rota is fixed and the plan works around it. This is the design premise, not a limitation of it.
2. Sleep opportunity is the thing to protect first. Light and caffeine are arranged around it rather than competing with it.
3. Anchoring some sleep at a consistent time across a rotation is generally easier to sustain than fully re-timing for each shift type.
4. Days off are part of the pattern. A plan that ignores what happens on your rest days is planning about a third of your week away.

Where the method is still being specified

How far to shift across a transition day, and the nap durations and placements worth recommending, are not settled. Rotation direction, speed, and individual tolerance all bear on it, and shift-work research is considerably more varied in its populations and outcomes than day-schedule research.

We will document the choices and their sources when they are made. Nothing numeric is asserted on this page yet.

Safety

This is the part of the planner that matters most, so it is stated plainly rather than tucked into a limitations list.

Severe sleepiness is dangerous, and it is hardest to judge from the inside. Falling asleep unintentionally, drifting between lanes, microsleeps, or arriving somewhere with no memory of the journey are all signs that the sleepiness has gone past what a schedule adjustment addresses.

If that is happening — particularly on a commute home after a night shift — stop driving and arrange to see a doctor. Say explicitly that you have been sleepy while driving. It changes how urgently your case is handled, and it is the detail people most often leave out.

What it will not do

• It will not tell you whether you are fit to work or fit to drive.
• It will not serve as a workplace fatigue-risk assessment, and it should not be submitted as one.
• It will not diagnose shift work sleep disorder or any other condition.
• It will not recommend medication, supplements, or stimulants beyond discussing the timing of ordinary caffeine intake.

Limitations

It cannot make a night shift feel like a day shift. It arranges controllable parts around an uncontrollable one, and the residual difficulty is real.

It cannot see how much daylight your commute gives you, how well you can darken a room, or whether the people you live with are on a different schedule. Those often matter more than anything the planner outputs.