So many of us who work in retail, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, factories and other industries work in shifts. Not regular 9-5 work weekdays, but shifts that are rotating on different day schedules and time frames.
Keeping track of your planned shifts, especially when it comes to planning family events and activities with your family or your friends, becomes complicated. Because when your daughter or husband needs to know whether you are free for example on Saturday, March 25, they have no clue? You might have your calendar on your phone or computer to look into the details, but they have no idea. And even if you are free on the 25, they may not know that you are doing a night shift on the 24th and will not be available during the day of the 25th.
Here is the solution a digital calendar that displays your shift schedule in clear images for you and your family members to see. No more confusion. No digging into phones or computers to know your shifts. A clear and beautiful shift calendar display for your wall or desk that clearly identifies when you are working and what shift it is.
And the best part is that it works with Google calendar. Something that most of us already use to schedule our work and family lives.
So how does it work:
Step 1: Setup the events on your calendar.
We will use a a Google Calendar in this example. But you can use any calendar service that integrates with Mango Display.
We recommend creating a new google calendar in your account and name it accordingly. As an example: ‘Michelle’s Hospital Shift Schedule’. But, you can use your existing calendar as well and just add your shifts with the appropriate image where you need them.
For example is this scenario let’s say that Michelle is a nurse and her 12 hour shift schedule is 4 days on (2 days, 2 nights) and then 5 days off.
We will setup her first shift on her calendar as a new event, with the appropriate start and end time, we will just name it ‘Day Shift’. Then click on the ‘Does not repeat’ drop down as shown below and click on ‘Custom’.
We will set it to recur every 10 days to meet the shift schedule. Leave the ‘Ends’ at the default ‘never’
Then we choose the correct calendar, and we click on ‘attachments’ and we use any image we want to use to display for our day shift. Here are some image examples for day and night shift that you could use.
Once we have attached our image. Simply make sure the appropriate sharing permissions outlined below is applied.
Quick steps to modify the default permissions on your attached image file
And you are done!
Hit save and that shift setup is complete. Now do the same for the next three remaining shifts and we are done with setting up the events.
Step 2: Activate the specific calendar to display photo events
Once you have setup your Mango Display. Go to the calendar widget.
Click on ‘Add your Google Calendar Account’ and follow the steps to authorize Mango Display to access to that account’s calendar. After that is completed, expand your Google Calendar Account so you can see all the calendars in your account.
Tap the greyed out image icon next to the calendar you want to set as Photo Calendar. The ‘Michell’s Hospital Shift Schedule’ calendar in our example. This will provide you with the following screen.
Enable the Photo Calendar option and modify any other configurations you like and click save. The image icon next to your calendar will now be active.
That it! Now you will see your shift photo events along with other regular events show up on your calendar display. You can continue to add, change or remove events in your Google Calendar and they will automatically be reflected on your Mango Display Calendar.
Note that if you have multiple events on the same day as a photo shift event, only the photo shift event will be displayed for that day. Also this only applies to Monthly calendar type.
We are you sure you will enjoy this feature. Use it to display your shift calendar at home, so you and your family can stay updated on when your shifts are and plan accordingly. No more confusion!
Get started now with your digital shift wall calendar!