Many teams choose to schedule their team's breaks to ensure they have enough coverage throughout the day.
You can schedule and stagger breaks for different surfers and shifts by creating rules. You can create as many rules as your team need. Surfboard will then automatically schedule these breaks for you once the Activity Plan is applied to the schedule.
How to schedule breaks in Surfboard
Breaks are best scheduled using Activity Plan rules. Activity Plans let you automate your break scheduling using simple rules. Breaks are scheduled according to:
Who the break is for
How long the break is
The window of time the break should be scheduled within
Surfboard will then stagger the start times of breaks and evenly rotate time slots between surfers to prevent large drops in coverage.
You can also choose to manually schedule breaks directly in the schedule if you need to adapt on the fly. Read more about manual edits here.
Creating a break rule ☕️
This section will walk you through how to create a break rule in an Activity Plan.
1. Add a break rule
Click 'add break rule' from the toolbar on the left of your screen.
You'll now be taken to the break rule form.
2. Choose or create a break
Select the break that you want to schedule.
If you have already made some breaks you can select one of those.
If you haven't created any breaks yet, create a new one. When you create a break you can give it a name, emoji and a colour (this is how the break will appear in the schedule).
If you need to reuse the same break for multiple rules, you can enter a custom name to identify it within your Activity Plan, e.g. UK team's lunch, German team's lunch. (this won't affect how the break shows in your schedule).
3. Define how the break should be scheduled
Set how long the break is: You can create a break as short as 15mins
Choose when this break should be scheduled: Select the days, time window and timezone to schedule the break. You can add extra windows if breaks happen at different times on different days
Choose how much you want to stagger breaks: Breaks will stagger within the window you set in the previous step.
Filter surfers: By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations. Read more about how to use filters here.
4. Filtering surfers
By default, every surfer in the plan will be included in the rule. You can use filters to choose which surfers should be included in each rule. This allows you to create rules for different groups of surfers for different situations.
The filters you have available are:
Surfer - Include or exclude specific surfers
Surfer skill - Include or exclude surfers based on the skills they have
Shift - Include or exclude surfers based on the shift they have that day
Scheduled activities - Include or exclude surfers based on if they are scheduled or not scheduled on another activity.
e.g Include surfers who have not worked on the Priority calls activity
Shift length - Include or exclude surfers based on the length of their shift.
You also have the ability to use multiple filters within the same rule. This gives you a lot of flexibility over how activities are scheduled. For example you could say:
"include surfers who are skilled on Phones, not on the Evening shift and have not been scheduled on Chat."
5. Review your breaks
Take a look at your schedule preview to see how this break is scheduled across different days.
If it doesn’t look right, you can adjust your settings.
When you’re happy, hit save!
Top tips 💡
You can create as many break rules as you need to schedule all your surfers.
If you scheduling an international team, you can create a break rule per timezone - just set the timezone you want the break to be scheduled in when defining the break window.
We recommend choosing ‘surfers on certain shifts’ to adapt to changing shifts day to day. For example, everyone on the late shift has lunch from 15:00 - 17:00 and everyone on the early shift has lunch from 11:30 - 13:30)