Guide
A printable sheet for the audition table, and the five Google Form questions that get you usable answers.
Download the printable conflict sheet (PDF). One page, one person. It asks for a name, a way to reach them, the weekly times they can’t do, the specific dates they’re away, and anything else — and nothing more. No date of birth, no address. If the performer is under 13, a parent or guardian fills it in.
The classic conflict sheet is a month-by-month calendar where people shade in days. It looks thorough, and it produces three problems every time. People shade whole days when they mean “after 7”. They shade a Tuesday in October and forget it’s every Tuesday. And they write in the margins — “maybe the 14th?” — which nobody can schedule around. The stage manager then spends an evening squinting at forty calendars.
A better sheet asks people to write their conflicts as rules: a weekly pattern, a single date, or a range of dates, each with times if it isn’t the whole day. Rules are easier to write, easier to read, and they don’t silently expire at the end of the calendar page.
If you collect conflicts online, use these five questions, in this order. Keep the question titles exactly like this — they make the export clean to read, by a person or by the planner.
| Question | Type | Help text |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Short answer, required | First and last name, as you’d like it on the call sheet. |
| Short answer | Where call notices should go. A parent’s email is fine. | |
| Weekly conflicts (e.g. Tuesdays after 7pm) | Paragraph | Anything that repeats every week. Include times if it isn’t the whole evening. |
| Specific dates you’re away | Paragraph | One per line: “Nov 14–16, wedding” or “Dec 3, leaving at 8pm”. |
| Anything else | Paragraph | Things you’d prefer to avoid but could do if needed — say “prefer not” so we know it’s flexible. |
Leave out a calendar-grid question. Grids export as dozens of columns that nobody can read. Leave out age and birthday questions too — you don’t need them to schedule rehearsals, and you shouldn’t hold data you don’t need. To export, open the form’s Responses tab and download the responses as CSV.
Treat everything as hard unless the person says otherwise. “Prefer not”, “if possible”, “would rather not” and “ideally” mean soft. A good schedule respects every hard conflict without exception and keeps soft conflicts to a minimum — and when it has to use one, the stage manager knows exactly which and why.
Type each conflict in as a rule and keep the original words beside it, so when someone says “I never said Tuesdays” you can point to what they wrote. Or skip the typing: the Tonight’s Call planner reads pasted emails, the Google Form export, and photos of the paper sheets, turns each sentence into a rule you confirm, and lists anything it couldn’t interpret with the original words. Nothing is silently dropped.
Skip the spreadsheet
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