I Built a Free Tool Because Sunday Night Planning Was Breaking Me

This is the story of why RTI Scheduler exists. It isn’t a story about a clever piece of software. It’s about Sunday nights.

The Sunday night problem

For a lot of people who run intervention sessions, Sunday evening quietly becomes planning time. It starts with a quick look at the week, and turns into an hour or two of piecing together a schedule from sticky notes, a paper planner, a calendar app, emails and the margins of meeting notes. Which group is when? Did that session move? Are the copies done for Tuesday? Which of these is actually urgent?

None of those questions is hard. The problem is that the answers are scattered across half a dozen places, and gathering them takes far longer than it should. By the time everything is in one place, the weekend is gone, and by Tuesday something has changed and the whole picture needs rebuilding.

What I wanted instead

As a web developer, I wanted to fix that with the simplest thing that could possibly work. Not another platform with logins from the district, rosters and dashboards, but a single list that answered three questions at a glance:

• When is each session and task?
• What needs to be ready, and when?
• Which of these matters most today?

And it had to be quick to change, because in a school, plans change every day.

What I deliberately left out

The hardest part of building RTI Scheduler was deciding what not to build. No student names, no rosters, no data, no progress tracking. Partly to keep it simple, and partly because that information already has a proper home in a school’s approved systems, with the protections it needs. A personal planner should never become a shadow copy of student records.

I also left out the things that make many tools tiring: setup wizards, required accounts, notifications and complicated recurring rules. You can open the page and add your first task in under a minute, without signing up.

How it turned out

RTI Scheduler today is intentionally small:

• add a task with a name, date, time and priority;
• see it in Today, Upcoming or All Tasks, in time order;
• edit or delete it in seconds when plans change;
• plan as a guest, or use a free account to see your schedule on any device.

It’s free, and it will stay focused on doing that one job well.

What helps Sunday nights

The tool helps, but the habits around it help more. The biggest one: move your weekly planning from Sunday night to Friday afternoon, while the week is still fresh. I wrote that routine up in the Friday intervention planning review. Pair it with scheduling preparation a day or two ahead (see splitting preparation into small tasks), and Sunday can go back to being Sunday.

Tell me what would help

RTI Scheduler gets better because educators tell me what is confusing or missing. If something gets in your way, or you have an idea, email rtischeduler7@gmail.com. Every message is read personally.

— Raza Mehdi, founder of RTI Scheduler