User guide / On the Subbook page

Best Available and overlap

How Bettersubbook decides which open shifts fit around your life, and what the colors mean.

The idea

For each open shift on the page, Bettersubbook asks: would this clash with anything else I'm doing? “Anything else” means two things:

Your busy time: classes and other commitments from your calendar, files, links, and blocks you added by hand (including recurring ones).
Your own saved shifts.

Note

“Availability” here means blocked (busy) time, not free time. A row is judged by what it overlaps, not by what's open.

The colors

Color	Meaning
Green	No overlap with any busy time or saved shift. Floats to the top.
Red	At least one real overlap.
Gray	The row's date or time couldn't be read, so no judgment is made.
Yellow	Only in Shifts with overlap: a free shift that hands off to (or from) one of yours. It's a heads-up, not a good/bad judgment.

Within each color, rows stay ordered by date, keeping the site's own order for ties.

Repeating rows

A row like “Wednesdays, Sep 30 to Dec 16” turns red if any single date clashes, because the whole run has to be workable. A repeating class only blocks dates from its first upcoming session to its last, so next semester's class doesn't affect this month.

Hand-offs: why 15 minutes of overlap is okay

Back-to-back shifts overlap by 10–15 minutes on purpose: the next person starts before the last one ends. So, at the same place, up to 15 minutes of overlap with your own shift counts as a hand-off, not a clash. This applies in Best Available as well.

A longer overlap, a shift inside yours, or a different place is still a clash.
Blocked time (a class, for example) gets no allowance.
ARC Indoor and ARC Outdoor count as the same place. CRCE and Freer are each their own.

Shifts with overlap

This sort mode is for stringing shifts together. It keeps only rows that are free (no clash) and line up with one of your saved shifts at the same place, in one of two ways:

Picks up as yours ends: it starts within 15 minutes of your shift's end and runs past it.
Hands over to yours: it ends within 15 minutes of your shift's start and began before it.

Worked example

Say you're saved for ARC Indoor, 4:00 – 8:00 PM. Which open shifts appear?

Open shift	Shown?	Why
ARC Indoor, 7:50 – 10:00 PM	Yes	Starts 10 minutes before your end and runs past it: picks up as you end.
ARC Outdoor, 2:00 – 4:10 PM	Yes	Same place (ARC), ends 10 minutes after your start and began earlier: hands over to you.
CRCE, 8:00 – 10:00 PM	No	Different place.
ARC Indoor, 6:00 – 10:00 PM	No	Starts well inside your shift: a real clash.
ARC Indoor, 5:00 – 7:00 PM	No	Sits entirely inside yours.

Tip

Looking to extend a day without extra travel? Choose Shifts with overlap, and every row that appears is free and at a place you're already going to be.

Something missing or unclear? Tell us and we'll fix the guide.