Shift, task, and assignment: the difference
Three words that are easy to confuse: a shift is a plan of availability, a task is a unit of work, and an assignment is the link between them.
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Three ideas that sound alike in a group chat and mean different things here.
A shift is a plan of availability. It answers which employees are scheduled for a particular day, property and time. It says nothing about work and counts no hours worked: it is not a timesheet.
A task is a unit of work: a cleaning, a repair, an inspection, a replenishment. It has a kind, a state and, where one exists, a deadline.
An assignment is the link between them: who carries this task out. For a cleaning the assignment is inseparable from an exact hour inside the assignee’s shift — the person and the hour are written together, in one action.
From this comes the rule that holds the cleaning schedule up: a cleaning cannot be placed outside the assignee’s shift — not by the planner and not by hand. A person and an hour can be named only inside the shift; if the hour that is needed does not exist, the roster changes first. Every other kind of work — repair, inspection, replenishment, general — carries no such restriction and can be assigned to any active employee on any day.
There is no shared queue that people take work from.
More: Employee shifts.