The two characters for 'early shift' contained more than I thought

Last time, I wrote about how I left shift scheduling entirely up to AI and failed miserably.

The cause was how I communicated. I hadn't put the 'obvious' things in my head into words to pass on. Once I realized that, my work became a steady process of writing down the language of the workplace for the AI, one piece at a time.

There is one thing that surprised me when I tried it.

The two characters for 'early shift.' They contained much more than I had imagined.

Writing 'early shift' is enough in the workplace

If you write 'early shift,' it is understood. What time it starts and ends, when the break is, and how many people are needed to keep things running during that time. If you are a person on the floor, everything comes to mind just by seeing those two characters.

But that 'everything' is not written down anywhere. It is just something we all vaguely understand in our heads.

So, when I passed it to the AI, I opened up those invisible contents one by one. What time to what time. How many minutes for a break. How many hours of actual work. How many people are needed during the day. It was a process of bringing everything behind those two characters out into the open.

The part I stumbled on the most was the night shift

Among them, the most difficult was the night shift.

The night shift doesn't end in one day. You go in at night, work until morning, and the next day is 'off-duty.' The day after that is often a 'scheduled day off.' Night shift, off-duty, and scheduled day off form a single unit.

However, at first, the AI treated the night shift as a shift for just that day. So, it would nonchalantly put an early shift the day after a night shift. That is a sequence we would never do on the floor.

This, too, was not the AI's fault. I just hadn't told it, 'The night shift is one thing that spans three days.'

Passing it as a single block rather than three separate schedules

So, I changed how I passed the information.

I stopped passing the night shift, off-duty, and scheduled day off as three separate days and decided to pass them as 'one unit.' Once the night shift is placed, the off-duty and scheduled day off automatically follow. They cannot be moved separately.

When I did that, the AI stopped arranging them in strange ways.

My washing machine sometimes eats one of my socks. When I am folding dry laundry, there is always one sock left over, just the right one. Where did its partner go? Even if I look inside the washing machine, it is not there.

The socks that have become single cannot be thrown away, so they pile up in the corner of the drawer. Thinking that maybe, someday, it will come back. Well, it has never come back even once, though.

Next time, I will talk about how I put into words the consideration that is obvious in the workplace—'don't leave a new hire alone.' Something like, 'Actually, even that person had a time when they were a new hire.'