Most calendar tools assume the wrong workweek.

The problem

A traditional vacation planner connects PTO to Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays. That is useful for a conventional office schedule and often useless for rotating workers. A firefighter may begin a 24-hour tour on Sunday. A nurse may work three nights, sleep through part of the next day, and then have several natural days away. A plant operator’s weekends can move through the calendar every cycle.

The Time Off Map approach

Start with the exact repeating rotation. Align it to a work date the person can verify. Show the resulting calendar plainly. Then search that real schedule for the PTO shifts that bridge the largest blocks of natural time away.

Product principles

• The calculator comes before the article.
• No account is required for the core tool.
• Results show their assumptions and can be checked.
• Holiday relief is never silently assumed for shift workers.
• Only genuinely different schedule patterns receive separate pages.
• Exports and sharing should reduce work, not capture personal data.

Still improving

The first release focuses on common rotations, PTO-hour budgeting, future-date lookup, and calendar exports. Custom cycles, roster exceptions, spouse overlays, timed calendar events, and full-year PTO portfolios are natural later additions.