The fundamental truth about conflicting availability

If you have more than 6 people on a team, there is no perfect time. Someone always has a conflict. A class, a job, a family commitment, another rehearsal. Trying to find the time that works for everyone leads either to a schedule that requires constant negotiation or to a schedule you eventually impose because the negotiation goes nowhere.

The goal isn't perfect overlap. The goal is maximum reasonable overlap — and a set of tools and expectations that make partial availability workable rather than chaotic.

Step 1: Collect availability before you schedule anything

The most common scheduling mistake is deciding a time first and then asking people to work around it. This generates resentment, recurring absences from people who had prior commitments that weren't consulted, and the constant fiction that everyone agreed to the schedule.

Instead: collect availability first. Use a grid that covers 2–4 weeks of possible rehearsal windows. Ask every member to mark when they're free. Then schedule around the real data.

Coryo's availability grid does this automatically — members fill it in and you see the full overlap without manual cross-referencing. The result is a schedule that reflects actual team availability, not the schedule you wanted. See how availability collection works in Coryo →

Step 2: Find the 80% window, not the 100% window

If you wait for a time that works for everyone, you'll either be scheduling months in advance or you'll never schedule at all.

Aim for the window with the best attendance — 80–90% of the team for core rehearsals, ideally 100% for final run-throughs and performance-week sessions. Schedule the mandatory high-stakes sessions (like teaching a new section or running the full piece clean) during the highest-attendance windows.

This means explicitly accepting that some rehearsals will have partial attendance. The decision to accept this is better than the alternative — a schedule that keeps sliding because you're trying to reach 100%.

Step 3: Set attendance expectations before the first rehearsal

Attendance expectations work best when they're stated explicitly at the project kickoff — not after someone has already missed 3 sessions.

State clearly: - The minimum percentage of rehearsals expected (e.g., 75% for most sessions, 100% for final rehearsals and performance) - What happens when that minimum isn't met (position changes, removal from high-visibility sections) - How conflicts should be communicated and how much notice is required - That the schedule was built from their own availability data, so "I wasn't available" isn't a valid excuse for sessions they're already marked free

Expectations communicated in advance create accountability. Expectations communicated after conflict arises feel punitive.

Step 4: Sequence your material by attendance priority

Not all rehearsal material is equally critical. Some sections need everyone; some can be taught to a partial group and reviewed later.

Schedule for full attendance: Sections where all dancers are present together — opening formations, finales, sections where the whole group changes position simultaneously. These require everyone.

Schedule for partial attendance: Clean-up sessions, small-group work (solos, duets, trios), sections that only involve a subset of the team.

By matching the complexity of the material to the expected attendance, you avoid the worst-case scenario: teaching a critical section that depends on all 14 dancers, and 4 of them weren't there.

Step 5: Build in buffer — and enforce it

Even the best-planned schedule will lose a session. Someone gets sick. The venue cancels. A conflict you didn't anticipate comes up.

Plan for one cancellation per month. Don't pack the schedule so tight that a single missed session puts you behind. If you plan to be done by week 8, schedule enough sessions to absorb a week 5 cancellation and still finish on time.

Enforcing the schedule means not rescheduling every time someone has a conflict. If you've set attendance expectations and scheduled around real availability, a dancer who conflicts with an existing session has the responsibility to catch up — not the responsibility of the team to find a new time.

This is the hardest part of running a dance team. But it's also where attendance tracking earns its value: you have documented evidence that the session happened, what was covered, and who attended. That evidence makes the conversation objective rather than a debate about memory.