Timetable Maker

A timetable is a small thing that a lot of people depend on: a class of forty and eight teachers, or one student trying to cover six subjects before an exam. A good one is easy to make and a bad one causes trouble every week, because it is rarely the subjects that are wrong. It is the frame: periods that do not add up, a break in the wrong place, a Saturday that was forgotten. This is how to get the frame right, and then fill it.

Start with the frame, not the subjects

Before typing a single subject, settle four things. They are the parts that are painful to change later.

The days. Monday to Friday, or Saturday as well, or all seven for a study plan. Switch each day on or off above the table. A day you switch off takes whatever was typed under it, so the page offers an Undo.

The start time and the period length. With these two, every other time follows. In the school layout, eight periods of 40 minutes start at 8:00. Change the first period's times and the rest can be retyped in order, or remove and re-add rows: a new period starts when the one above it ends and lasts as long as the last lesson above it.

The breaks. Decide where they fall and how long they are before placing any subject, because a break moves every period after it.

The number of periods. Count how many lessons the week needs in total, then see whether the frame holds them. Six days of eight periods is 48 boxes. If the subjects add up to 45 periods, three boxes are free for a library hour, games or a class meeting. If they add up to 52, no arrangement will fit them, and it is better to learn that now.

How much teaching time a school day holds

It is worth adding up the frame once.

The school layout here has eight 40-minute periods, which is 320 minutes or 5 hours 20 minutes of teaching. Its breaks are a 10-minute recess after the second period, 30 minutes for lunch after the fourth and 10 minutes after the sixth: 50 minutes in all. Starting at 8:00, the last bell is at 2:10 PM, a day of 6 hours 10 minutes.

For elementary classes in India there is a legal floor to compare with. The Schedule to the Right to Education Act, 2009 sets, for an academic year:

Divide one by the other and you get the least a day can hold on average: 4 hours for classes I to V, and about 4 hours 33 minutes for classes VI to VIII. In 40-minute periods that is six periods for the younger classes and just under seven for the older ones.

So a day of eight 40-minute periods clears the floor with room to spare, which matters because real school years lose days to exams, functions and weather. A day of six 35-minute periods, at 3 hours 30 minutes, would not reach the 4-hour average.

The same Schedule sets a minimum of 45 working hours a week for a teacher, counting preparation time along with teaching. That is a figure about the teacher's week, not about how many periods to assign, but it is a reminder that the hours outside the grid are part of the job.

These are national minimums for classes I to VIII. Boards, states and individual schools set their own calendars and period lengths above them, and classes IX to XII are outside the Act. Your school's own rules are the ones to follow.

Where the breaks go

A break in this tool is a row that runs across every day as one bar. Tick Break on a row and give it a name: Lunch, Recess, Assembly, Prayer.

Two things follow from marking it as a break instead of typing "Lunch" in six boxes:

• The numbering skips it. The lesson after lunch is still Period 5, not Period 6, which is how everyone in the building will refer to it.
• It is not counted as a subject. The list of periods a week under the page stays a list of lessons.

Common patterns are one long break in the middle, or a short one after two periods and lunch after four. What matters more than the pattern is that nobody goes more than two or three lessons without a pause, and that lunch is not so early or so late that it is useless.

Assembly at the start of the day is a break row at the top. Put the day's real start time on it, so that Period 1 shows the time teaching begins.

Placing the subjects

With the frame fixed, filling the boxes is a matter of a few rules of thumb. None of them is a law; they are the things timetable-makers tend to check.

• Spread each subject across the week. A subject with six periods works better as one a day than as three on Monday and three on Friday.
• Avoid the same slot every day. If Maths is always the last period, it always gets the tired half-hour. Rotating it through the day is fairer to the subject.
• Keep double periods together. Labs, art and games often need two periods back to back. Place those first, since they have the fewest places they can go, and never across a break unless that is intended.
• Place shared rooms and shared teachers before anything else. One computer lab and one sports ground can each hold one class at a time. A part-time teacher who comes on three days fixes those boxes before you start.
• Leave one or two boxes free. A timetable with no slack has nowhere to put a make-up class.

Type the subject as you want it to appear. Spelling decides what counts as the same subject: "Maths" and "maths" are one, "Maths" and "Mathematics" are two. Adding the teacher's initials or a room, such as "Science (RK) Lab 2", is fine, but then each different combination is a separate entry in the count.

A study timetable that lasts past Wednesday

A personal study timetable fails for different reasons than a school one. Nobody rings a bell, so the plan has to be one you will keep.

• Put the fixed things in first. School or coaching hours, travel, meals and sleep. What is left is the time you really have, and it is usually less than it felt.
• Use blocks you can finish. A two-hour block with a planned pause works; a five-hour block named "Physics" does not. The study plan layout here has blocks of one and a half to two hours with meals, a break and exercise between them.
• Name the task, not just the subject. "Chemistry: organic, exercise 4" is something you can tick off. "Chemistry" is not.
• Give the hardest subject your best hours, whenever those are for you, and the lightest work the hours when you are usually tired.
• Keep one block empty each day. Something always overruns. A plan with a spare block absorbs that; a full one collapses and gets abandoned.
• Rewrite it weekly. The table is saved in your browser, so on Sunday you can open it, move what did not work, and print the new week.

Rows do not have to follow one another on the clock. Leave the afternoon out of the table if you are in class then, and pick up again at 4:00.

Colours and the count of periods

With A colour for each subject switched on, every subject gets its own soft colour, the same in every box. The point is not decoration. Colour shows the shape of the week at a glance: a subject bunched on two days, or one that only ever appears after lunch, stands out in a way it does not in black and white.

Under the page is a list of how many periods each subject has in the week. Check it against what the syllabus needs. It is the quickest way to catch a subject that was given five periods when it should have six.

The colours are pale enough to print on a black-and-white printer as light grey without hiding the text. For a page that will be photocopied many times, switch them off.

Printing and sharing

The finished page is A4, sideways. A4 is 297 × 210 mm, and at 150 dots per inch that is 1,754 × 1,240 pixels, which is the size of the picture.

• PDF is for printing. Choose landscape and 100% in the print window. One page, whatever the number of rows, up to the 16 the table allows.
• Picture (PNG) is for a class WhatsApp group, a phone wallpaper or pasting into a notice.
• Spreadsheet (CSV) opens in Excel or Google Sheets, with the times in the first column and one column a day. Use it to keep an editable copy or to start next term's table.

The clock can be shown as 8:00 AM or as 08:00. Choose whichever your school writes on its own notices.

What this tool does not do

It does not build the timetable for you. Working out who teaches what, when, without two classes needing the same teacher at once is a real scheduling problem, and schools with many sections use dedicated software for it. This is the tool for typing up a timetable you have worked out, or for one class, one teacher or one student.

It makes one table at a time. For a teacher's own timetable, type the class in each box instead of the subject. For several sections, make each, download it, then change the title and the boxes for the next.

The table is stored in your browser on this device and nowhere else. It is not uploaded, it does not follow you to another phone or computer, and clearing your browser's site data removes it. The PDF and the CSV are your copies.