Playbook 5
Planning a new watchbill
AI Tools Field Guide
Not affiliated with OpenAI, Google, xAI or Anthropic; your organization’s rules come first.
Give it the quals, the dates and the rules. Make it show its work, then check the count yourself.
Set it up
- Numbers, not names. W01 to W24 in the chat; the key that maps them to people stays in your spreadsheet.
- One row per watchstander: ID, the watches they are qualified for, the dates they are unavailable. Paste it or attach the CSV.
- Split the rules. Hard rules can never break. Preferences bend when they must. Say which is which.
- In-port routine only. Operational schedules and movements stay out unless your command says otherwise.
Work it in four passes
- Pick the careful model. Pro GPT 5.6 Terra Grok Expert Scheduling is reasoning; the fast tier drops rules.
- Draft two weeks, not two months. Short spans keep every rule in view. Carry the last watch forward into the next span.
- Ask for the audit. A count per person, weekend watches per person, and every rule it could not meet.
- Change one thing at a time. “W07 is on leave the 22nd to the 26th. Fix that week and move as few people as possible.”
Say it like this
Build a 14-day watchbill from the table below. Hard rules: every watch filled by someone qualified; nobody on a day marked unavailable; twelve hours between watches.
Preference: even weekend watches. Return a table by date and watch, a count per person, and every rule you could not meet. Invent nobody.
Take away
It is a fast first draft and a tireless rule checker, not the watchbill coordinator. Count the watches in Excel, then sign it yourself.