For corrections officers

The rotation

Institutions run around the clock with a fixed number of posts to fill, so the schedule is built from the posts backwards. Depending on the facility that means eight-hour watches on a 5-2 5-3 cycle, twelve-hour Panama or 4 on 4 off patterns, or a bid rotation that runs for months.

Whatever yours is, you save it once and the calendar fills itself in, forward and backward.

Mandatory overtime is the whole problem

A post cannot go unmanned. That means holdovers at the end of a shift, callbacks on days off, and doubles that were nobody's plan. Those hours are the ones most likely to go unrecorded and the ones most worth having a record of.

Log the shift with the hours you actually worked rather than the hours on the roster. Give mandatory overtime its own category and color, and after a few months you can see the pattern in your own year rather than guessing at it.

Posts are not interchangeable

A tower, a unit, transport, the hospital watch, the perimeter — these are different days. Because you build your own categories, each post can be its own entry with only the fields it needs. Transport gets mileage and an address. A unit post does not.

Leave, and getting it approved

Leave in corrections is bid, capped and fought over, and it has to be planned around a rotation that walks through the week. Seeing the whole year laid out — including the months you have already worked — is what makes a leave request realistic.

Off-duty work

Where your agency permits outside work, it goes under the employer who hired you with the hours, the pay, the miles and whether you have been paid. Federal and many state agencies require approval first, and some restrict it — your policy and your union govern that.