On-call rotas that live in a feed you don’t control
4-minute read
The rota is published as a feed. You subscribed to it, it appeared, and now it is one more read-only calendar you cannot reshare, cannot annotate, and cannot tell whether it is still updating.
PagerDuty and Opsgenie publish one. So does every hospital scheduling system, most volunteer fire services, ambulance trusts, airline crewing systems, referee and umpire assignors, and the average university department. The feed is the modern answer to “where is the rota”, and it has three sharp edges.
- It is read-only. You can’t share it onward to a partner who needs to know which nights you are on, and you can’t add your own notes beside a shift.
- It refreshes on its own schedule, silently. Nothing tells you it refreshed, and nothing tells you when it stopped.
- It can die quietly. A rotated URL, an expired token, a system migration — and the calendar simply stops changing. It still looks fine. That is the dangerous part: a stale rota looks exactly like a quiet month.
Mirror it into something you own
A copy in your own calendar is a copy you control. It can be shared with the people who need to plan around your shifts, it can be coloured so on-call weeks are visible at a glance, and — the part that matters at 3am — it can tell you when it has stopped being true.
The setup
- Make a calendar in your own account called On-call and pair the rota feed to it.
- Add a title prefix,
[On-call], so a shift is unmistakable next to your ordinary meetings. - Leave the in-calendar warning on. If the pair breaks — the feed vanished, the source calendar was renamed — an all-day warning appears in the On-call calendar, which means it reaches your phone without you opening anything. It clears itself when the pair recovers.
- Share the On-call calendar with whoever plans around it.
If your on-call feed and your ordinary work calendar both carry the same shift — which happens constantly, because the rota system also writes into your work account — turn on dedupe destinations and the duplicate block is skipped rather than stacked.
What this doesn’t fix
Calendar Mirror copies what the feed says. If the rota system publishes a shift late, the copy is late too — and how often the feed itself refreshes is set by your calendar account, not by this app. It also can’t reshare the feed’s attendee list, because Apple provides no way to set participants on a copied event. What it can do is make sure that the moment the feed stops arriving, you are told in the one place you are guaranteed to look.