The Pitman Schedule (2-2-3), and a Generator for It

The Pitman schedule — also written EOWEO, for "every other weekend off", and often just called 2-2-3 — is a 14-day rotation that covers a job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using four crews on 12-hour shifts. Each crew works two shifts, takes two days off, works three, takes two off, works two, then takes three off. Then it repeats.

The arithmetic, before the opinions

Seven shifts in every 14 days, at 12 hours each, is 84 hours a fortnight — a 42-hour average week. That number is the whole schedule in one figure, and it is worth sitting with. Against a 40-hour week it is 104 extra hours a year, about two and a half extra working weeks. Whether that shows up as overtime pay, as a lower base rate negotiated around the known average, or as an unpleasant surprise in payroll depends entirely on the employer, but it is never zero. Anyone presenting Pitman as a 40-hour schedule has not done the multiplication.

Four crews is not a choice either, it is what 24/7 costs. Two crews are on at any moment — one on days, one on nights — and two are off. Drop to three crews and somebody works a stretch nobody should work; add a fifth and you are paying for coverage you do not need.

Where the name comes from, and why Panama is the same cycle

Pitman and Panama run exactly the same 14-day pattern. There is no difference in the math between them. Anyone telling you they are structurally different rotations is describing the naming, not the cycle.

What differs is the anchor. Panama can start on any date — the cycle runs from wherever day one lands. Pitman pins that same cycle to the calendar week, specifically so the three-day-off block falls on a full Saturday and Sunday every other week rather than on some arbitrary pair of weekdays. That is the entire point of the name: Panama names the cycle, Pitman names the cycle anchored to the week.

In practice a lot of employers use "Pitman" and "2-2-3" interchangeably, and some use "Panama" for the anchored version too. The terminology is genuinely inconsistent across industries. What matters operationally is whether the schedule is pinned to the calendar week — not which of the names your shop happens to use for it.

What it is good at

A real weekend, on a predictable date. Every other Saturday and Sunday is fully off, and because the cycle is anchored, people can name the date months ahead. For staff planning a life around shift work, that predictability is usually worth more than the raw hours count.

Nothing longer than three in a row. The 2-2-3 cycle never asks for a fourth consecutive shift. DuPont's longest run is four nights back to back; this one tops out at three of anything, which is the main reason Pitman is generally considered the easier of the two on fatigue even though both average 42 hours.

Half as many handovers. Two 12-hour shifts a day instead of three 8s means one fewer shift change per day — and shift change is where information gets dropped.

What it costs

The SERP for this schedule is full of guides that stop at the benefits. These are the trade-offs worth knowing before you commit a workforce to it.

A 12-hour shift is not a 12-hour day. Add a handover at each end and a commute and you are at 13 to 14 hours away from home. On a three-shift block that is most of three days gone, not just the hours on the timesheet.

Somebody lives on nights. The generator on this page builds Pitman the usual way: two crews permanently on days and two permanently on nights. Nobody has to reset their body clock, but two crews never leave nights. If you would rather share the night work, the rotating version of the same 2-2-3 cycle — 14 days on days, then 14 on nights — is on the Panama generator; every crew then pays for it with a circadian reset every fortnight. There is no version of this where nobody absorbs the night work.

Three consecutive nights is the hard block. It is the shortest such block among the common rotations, but it is still three, and the two night crews work it every cycle.

The pattern is fixed, and your demand probably is not. This is the honest limitation of every rotation on this site, and the one the other guides do not raise. A rotation is a pattern: the same number of people on every day, forever. If Friday nights need six and Tuesday mornings need two, a rotation cannot express that — it will either overstaff Tuesday or understaff Friday, and no amount of choosing between Pitman and Panama fixes it. That is a scheduling problem, not a pattern problem, and it wants the full optimizer or the 24/7 shift schedule maker instead.

Who actually runs it

Pitman turns up most in continuous-coverage work where staff expect a real weekend now and then: police patrol, fire, emergency dispatch, security posts, and hospital shift work. Those are exactly the jobs that need round-the-clock cover and need to keep people long enough to be worth training. A "police Pitman schedule" is not a different schedule — it is this cycle, usually with 12-hour watches and the anchored weekend, which is why it shows up so often in law enforcement contracts.

If your setting has rules the pattern itself cannot carry — minimum beats per watch, rank or clearance requirements, rest rules that bind harder than the cycle — the rotation generator below will not enforce them, and it does not pretend to. The police patrol schedule and security guard pages solve those as constraints instead of drawing a pattern.

Generating your own

Set a start date and a number of weeks below and the generator returns the dated calendar — every crew, every day, with the weekday each block lands on, exported to Excel if you want it on paper. Because Pitman is the anchored variant, the generator starts it on a Monday so the off-blocks land where the name promises. Change the crew names to your own and it is a roster you can post.