Alternating Week Timetables: How A/B Weeks Work

Plenty of schools and universities don’t run the same week twice. The most common version is a two-week pattern — Week A and Week B, or Week 1 and Week 2, or odd and even weeks — but three- and four-week rotations exist too.

The concept is easy. Keeping track of it in October, after two bank holidays and a half term, is not.

Why calendar apps struggle with this

A standard calendar thinks in terms of “every Tuesday” or “every two weeks from this date”. That works right up until reality interferes:

• A holiday interrupts the pattern and the alternation shifts
• A one-off timetable change means the recurrence no longer matches
• The cycle isn’t two weeks, it’s three or four, and the recurrence rules get awkward fast

The workaround people land on is entering every week of the year individually, or giving up and keeping a photo of a printed timetable on their phone. Both work until something changes.

Modelling the cycle instead of the dates

The alternative is to store the pattern, not a year’s worth of individual events. That means recording two things:

1. How long the cycle is — two weeks, three, four
2. Which week you’re in right now

Everything else follows. The app can work out which week any future date falls in, and when the pattern is disturbed — a holiday, a snow day, an inset day — correcting it means changing one setting rather than editing weeks of entries.

This is how Weeklie works. You set the cycle length, fill in each week of the cycle once, and set the current week. After that the timetable shows the correct week on its own, and keeps doing so for the rest of the year.

Setting one up

1. Choose the number of repeating weeks in settings — up to four
2. Use the switcher at the top of the main screen to move between the weeks of the cycle, and enter the classes for each
3. Set which week is the current one

That’s the whole setup. The most common mistake is entering both weeks and then forgetting step three, which leaves the app showing the right classes on the wrong week.

After the holidays

This is where paper planners and hand-built calendars fail. Come back from a break and the alternation has often moved — the term restarts on a Week B rather than the Week A you’d expect.

Because Weeklie stores the current week as a setting, fixing this is one change. Set the current week to whatever the school says it is, and the rest of the year realigns.

What about six-day and rotating cycles?

Some timetables run on days rather than weeks: Day 1 through Day 6, repeating continuously, so a given day lands on a different weekday each time round.

Weeklie cannot model these. Its cycle is one to four whole weeks, and a six-day rotation deliberately doesn’t line up with the calendar — the pattern would only resolve after six weeks, beyond what the app supports. If your school runs a rotating day cycle, this is the wrong app and it’s better to know now.

Two-, three- and four-week rotations are fine, because those are whole weeks.

Seeing next week

Looking ahead shouldn’t change what “now” means. The week switcher lets you page through the cycle to check what a future week holds, while the app continues to treat the actual current week as current — so checking whether next Tuesday is a lab day doesn’t quietly break your timetable.