Tell your rotations about vacations and other planned absences ahead of time, by hand or synced from Google Calendar, so shifts are planned around them.

What is Time Off?

Time Off lets Rotation App know about your absences in advance: vacations, sick leave, conferences, or any period during which you don’t want to be assigned. No Slack status is needed: Out-Of-Office Detection, which looks at your Slack status when a shift starts, stays on as the safety net for the absences nobody entered.

Time off belongs to you, not to a rotation: one entry applies to every rotation you’re part of. Each rotation then handles it according to its own settings (see What happens in the rotations).

There are two ways to add time off, and they can be combined:

• By hand, from the Home tab: works for everyone, whatever calendar your company uses.
• Synced from Google Calendar: connect your Google account once, and the out-of-office events of your primary calendar show up as time off automatically.

Add time off by hand

1. Go to the Home tab: Learn where to find Rotation App’s Home tab
2. Press My Time Off in the time off row at the top.
3. Press ＋ Add time off.
4. Pick the first and last day of your absence. Dates are whole days in your Slack timezone.
5. Pick a reason: on vacation, out sick, out of office, or unavailable for shifts (at work, but unable to take a shift). The reason is only used to phrase the messages in the channel, like the absence categories of Out-Of-Office Detection.
6. Add a note if you like, then press Add.

Your upcoming time off is listed in the same dialog. Press Remove on an entry to delete it.

Sync your Google Calendar

If your company uses Google Calendar, you can let Rotation App read your out-of-office events instead of typing them again:

1. Open My Time Off as described above.
2. Press Connect in the Google Calendar section. A browser tab opens with Google’s consent screen.
3. Sign in and allow Rotation App to view your calendar events. You’ll get a confirmation in Slack, and the dialog shows the connection.

Once Google confirms, the My Time Off dialog updates by itself. From then on, every out-of-office event of your primary calendar becomes a time-off entry, and changes are picked up within about 30 minutes. Press 🔄 Sync now to refresh immediately.

Synced entries are read-only in Rotation App: edit or delete the event in Google Calendar instead. You can still add time off by hand on top of them, for example for a day you’re at work but don’t want to be on call.

What Rotation App reads

• Only the out-of-office events of your primary calendar. Regular events, meetings, and other calendars are never read.
• Only each event’s identifier, start, end, and a link to it. Titles and descriptions are never stored.
• Access is read-only. Rotation App never creates or changes anything in your calendar.

Press Disconnect at any time: Rotation App forgets its access to your calendar and removes the entries it synced. Time off added by hand is kept. You can also revoke access from your Google account permissions.

What happens in the rotations

A shift is considered unavailable for you when your time off covers a significant part of it (more than a quarter of its duration), the same rule Out-Of-Office Detection applies to Slack statuses. A single day off during a week-long shift doesn’t take you off the shift, a two-day break does. A shorter overlap changes nothing, but it isn’t hidden either: the shift announcement and the queue manager mention the days you’ll be away.

Whether a rotation plans around your absence ahead of time depends on one setting, Proactive Adjustments, under ⚖️ Balancing & Availability:

• With Proactive Adjustments or Load Balancing on: the queue is reordered as soon as the time off is added, exactly like a change of Days of Availability. Shifts that fall into your absence go to the next available person, and you get your turn back afterwards. If that changes who is on the shift running right now (say you call in sick today), the shift is announced again with the new assignee.
• With Proactive Adjustments off: the queue is not changed. You and the rotation owners receive a direct message listing the shifts that overlap your new time off, with a shortcut to the queue to arrange a substitute or skip the shift. Rotation App never reorders the queue on its own here: if a shift starts while you’re still assigned, it’s handled like a detected Slack status, following the rotation’s Out-Of-Office mode. The channel is asked whether to assign someone else (Ask each time), the next available person takes the shift (Always skip), or the announcement just mentions your time off (Never skip). The “automatically do so in the future” checkbox is never offered for time off, since it’s about Slack statuses.

Time off is meant to be settled before the shift, by the rotation or by your team. The Out-Of-Office mode only comes into play on the day, for a shift nobody settled.

In the queue manager, shifts that overlap someone’s time off are marked with the reason and dates, so owners can see conflicts at a glance.

Time off of your team

Rotation owners get an overview of their members’ upcoming absences:

1. Press ⚖️ Balancing & Availability on the rotation.
2. Press View next to Time Off.

The dialog explains how this rotation handles time off, lists the members’ time off for the next 90 days, and lets owners and admins add time off on behalf of a member who forgot to. At the bottom, it shows the rotation’s Out-Of-Office Detection mode, which also decides what happens when a shift starts during time off nobody settled, with a Configure button.

Via the API

Time off can also be read and written through the Rotation API, which is handy to mirror an HR system or a spreadsheet that already knows who’s away.