Notification Examples

Purpose

Concrete configurations for common scheduling scenarios. Use these as starting templates — copy the one that most closely matches your coverage pattern, swap in your own members and times, and extend as needed.

Audience

Relevant for App Admins and Group Managers building schedules

These examples assume you are already familiar with the shift editor. For the field-by-field walkthrough, see Scheduling Basics.

Prerequisites

• A group with at least one member.
• Familiarity with Scheduling Basics (the shift editor fields).
• Familiarity with Group Member Roles (Primary / Secondary / Manager).

Before You Build a Schedule — The Default 24x7 Shift

Every group is created with a single 24x7 shift by default. Until you add any additional shifts, notifications fall back to the static member roles on the group's Members tab — Primaries first, then Secondaries, then the Manager. Members sharing a role are paged in the order they are listed.

Add real shifts to model time-based coverage (business hours, overnight, rotating weeks). The examples below walk through the most common patterns.

Fixed Shift Examples

Fixed shifts hold the same member roles for the full shift period. Use them when responsibilities do not change week-to-week.

Example 1 — Office Hours (Mon–Fri, 8 AM – 5 PM, perpetual)

Because Fixed shifts on perpetual duration have no rotation, the same Primary is paged every weekday between 08:00 and 17:00. Outside those hours, the group falls back to the default 24x7 shift (or another shift if you have one).

Example 2 — Overnight Shift (Mon–Fri, 5 PM – 8 AM next morning)

Because the shift crosses midnight, the end time falls on the day after the last working weekday — that is why End Day is Saturday at 08:00 even though the shift is "Monday through Friday." The shift editor does not enforce this as a validation rule; instead, when you set End Day = Sat, the system auto-ticks Saturday in Shift Days. You can uncheck Saturday afterwards if you really want only Mon–Fri days highlighted on the grid, but the end anchor stays at Sat 08:00 for the overnight hand-off to land correctly.

Example 3 — Continuous Shift (Mon 5 PM – Fri 7:59 AM, single unbroken block)

The Continuous Shift Type turns the shift into one unbroken block from the start time on Monday through the end time on Friday, including the full weekend — different from a Block shift, which would split into separate daily blocks. Use Continuous when coverage should be uninterrupted across the window.

Because Continuous collapses the coverage into one span, the Shift Days checkboxes are disabled the moment you flip Shift Type to Continuous — you no longer pick individual days. Flip back to Block if you need daily on/off control.

Figure 1. A Block overnight shift (Mon–Fri 17:00 → 08:00 next morning) rendered on the Schedule tab. The grid shows two segments per day: the evening slice (17:00–23:59) and the following-morning slice (00:00–08:00). Under a Continuous Shift Type, the same interval would render as one unbroken span from Monday 17:00 through Saturday 08:00 with no internal divider.

Rotating Shift Examples

Rotating shifts cycle members through roles on a cadence you configure. For the notification and role-progression mechanics, see Notification Examples.

Example 1 — Weekly Rotation with One Primary (3 members)

Every Monday at 16:00, the rotation advances by one member. Week 1 pages the first Primary; Week 2 promotes the first standby member into Primary and rotates the previous Primary to the bottom of the standby queue. Only the current Primary is paged; standby members are off the pager until they cycle in.

Example 2 — Weekly Rotation with Primary and Secondary (3 members)

Every three-week cycle, each member spends one week as Primary, one week as Secondary, and one week off (Rotating). This is a good "fair rotation" pattern for small teams.

Example 3 — 24-hour Coverage with Three Shifts (Mon–Fri)

Create three separate shifts attached to the same group to cover every hour of a weekday:

Repeating Shift Examples

Repeat Shift Every lets you define a shift once and have it reset on a custom cadence. It lives on the Repeating and Custom templates only — the three named Rotating cards (Rotating - Weekdays After-Hours, Rotating - Weekends, Rotating - Business Hours) and all six Fixed cards do not expose this field. On Repeating the checkbox is pre-checked with a default of 4 Week(s) Until an end date; on Custom it is present but unchecked by default. The repeat interval unit is fixed as Week(s) — no days or months option for the repeat period.

Example 1 — Quarterly Maintenance Weekend

One maintenance weekend configured once repeats every 12 weeks for the rest of the calendar year. The manager does not have to manually recreate the shift every quarter.

Example 2 — Two-Week Nurse Rotation (daily swap)

Nurses swap Primary and Secondary roles every day, and the rotation resets back to the starting lineup every two weeks. Configured once, the schedule runs indefinitely with no manual maintenance.

Where Each Pattern Lives in the UI

For reference, the shift editor and the Schedule tab where you build and view these patterns:

Figure 2. The shift editor — where each of the examples above is configured.

Figure 3. The Schedule tab — shifts you create appear on this calendar.

Best Practices

Do

• Start with a Fixed shift if your coverage does not change week to week. Move to Rotating only when you need to cycle members.
• Use contrasting shift colors on multi-shift groups — the Schedule tab calendar becomes unreadable when overlapping shifts share the same hue.
• For 24-hour coverage, use separate shifts per time band and uncheck All Users In Group on each — otherwise every member is added to every shift.
• For Rotating shifts, set an end date six months to a year out so you have a natural checkpoint to audit the rotation.

Don't

• Don't build the same pattern in multiple groups — if several teams share a rotation, create the schedule once and consider a shared group.
• Don't set a Rotating shift with no end date. The rotation will keep cycling past when the team's composition has changed, and nobody will notice.
• Don't rely on the default 24x7 shift as your production coverage. It exists so that brand-new groups have someone reachable; replace it with explicit shifts as soon as your rotations are designed.