Put two jobs on one realistic calendar

Build the calendar backwards from sleep. Block 7 hours first, then the fixed job, then the flexible one — because the CDC recommends 7 or more hours of sleep a day for adults aged 18 to 60, on its page about sleep, and a two-job week that does not reserve them will take them from somewhere. The one condition that changes the order: if one job has a legally posted roster and the other does not, the posted one goes in before sleep, because you cannot move it.

Put the bridge between jobs on the calendar as its own block

The conflict is rarely two shifts overlapping. It is the hour between them, which nobody enters anywhere. Give it a block with a time on it: travel, parking or the walk, changing, and anything you have to hand over before you leave.

Use the real travel figure. On TriMet's 20-Burnside/Stark, the weekday trip from Gresham Central Transit Center to W Burnside & NW 5th takes 59 minutes, per TriMet's westbound weekday timetable. A bridge built on "about 40 minutes" fails twice a week and looks like bad luck.

Build the bridge in both directions. The trip from Job A to Job B and the trip from Job B home are different journeys at different times of day, and only one of them decides whether you get any sleep. Enter both.

Example: a 45-minute gap and a 74-minute bridge

Example figures on that real journey. Job A finishes at 2:30 pm. Job B starts at 3:15 pm. The ride is the 59 minutes above and changing takes 15, so the bridge is 74 minutes against a 45-minute gap — a 29-minute shortfall, every single day it occurs.

Deleting the changing block does not remove the changing. What it removes is your ability to explain the problem to either scheduler. Keep it visible and the sentence writes itself: "My confirmed finish at Job A plus 74 minutes of travel and changing puts me at Job B at 3:44, not 3:15."

One of three things then moves: the finish, the start, or the journey. Ask all three questions in the same week rather than one a month, because the answer you get from Job B depends on what Job A has already said.

Know which employer's 40 hours you are counting

Each employer counts its own workweek. Under the FLSA, a workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods — and overtime is owed at time and one-half for hours worked in excess of 40 in that workweek, the Department of Labor's overtime fact sheet says. Twenty-eight hours at one job and twenty at another is 48 hours of work and no overtime hours at either.

The same DOL fact sheet says there is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older work in a workweek, and no extra pay is required for Saturdays, Sundays or holidays as such. Federal law will not cap the total for you; the calendar has to.

The overnight turnaround is the expensive one

Where one job's finish and the other's start are close together, a city or state rule sometimes prices it. Oregon's predictive scheduling law pays time and a half for work during the first 10 hours following the end of a previous calendar day's work or on-call shift, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries says. That rule runs per employer, so it does nothing about a 10 pm finish at Job A followed by a 6 am start at Job B.

That combination is yours to police. Mark every turnaround under 10 hours on the calendar with its actual length — "finish 10 pm, start 6 am, 8 hours" — so the pattern is countable rather than felt.

What the sleep figure looks like on a real week

NIOSH puts the number plainly: sleep experts recommend at least 7 hours of sleep a day, and 2010 national data showed over 50% of night shift health care workers reported sleeping 6 or fewer hours a day, in its training module on shift work and long work hours. An 8-hour turnaround minus 59 minutes of travel each way and 30 minutes to eat leaves about 5 hours 30 minutes in bed, before anything else in the day happens.

That arithmetic is the argument. Take it to whichever scheduler has more flexibility, with the figure in it rather than the word "tired". If the sleep has to happen in daylight, explaining the window to the people you live with is the other half of protecting it.

Mark every line confirmed, waiting or unresolved

Three states, no fourth. Confirmed means someone with authority posted it. Waiting means you have asked and named the day you will chase. Unresolved means the collision is real and nobody has fixed it yet.

Do not let a plan graduate from waiting to confirmed because it has been sitting there a while. The flexible job's shifts stay in the waiting layer until its roster posts, which is the same two-layer method as planning a week whose shifts keep changing, applied to two rosters instead of one. Where one job creates long midday gaps rather than collisions, the arithmetic is different and lives in the split-shift calculation.

Write these two entries tonight and the week stops being a guess:

Tue — Job A ends 2:30 pm, bridge 74 min (59 travel + 15 change), Job B starts 3:15 pm. Shortfall 29 min. Not fixed yet: asked Job B for a 3:30 start on the 14th. Thu/Fri — turnaround 10 pm to 6 am = 8 hours. Sleep available after travel and a meal: about 5 h 30 m. Under the 7 hours the CDC recommends.