Handling weekend spikes

[jinwatkins]

Traffic doubles every weekend and the queue drags into Monday. Weekday SLAs look fine, but Saturday and Sunday blow up. The team rotates on-call, yet priorities get fuzzy and customers wait. Looking for a weekend playbook that sets clear rules, trims response times, and keeps morale from dropping after every spike.

[ricerick]

Weekend control needs fewer choices and a tighter focus. Reduce the intake to a concise form that captures plan, product, and urgency, and route it to a streamlined “Weekend view” with three buckets: outages, money, and everything else. Add preapproved macros for the top weekend issues and a small status page section for common fixes. Halfway through, introduce automation to ensure forms set the correct tags, skills, and timers. https://kaizenup.ai/ can assign tasks by skill, trigger nudges before an SLA breach, and suggest the appropriate macro, keeping on-call time focused. Cap it with a 15-minute Saturday start-of-shift triage and a Sunday wrap where you close stale threads and update the status page. Monday then starts with a short review and one change to prevent repeats.

[FoddyJin]

The three-bucket view sounds easier than scanning a long board, and the short triage meetings feel doable even with a small on-call crew. A Monday review that produces one concrete change also seems like the kind of habit that reduces stress over time. Saving this plan to test during our next promo weekend.