3-Week Look-Ahead Schedule Template (Free Excel)

Every trade meeting in commercial construction runs on the same document: the three-week look-ahead. It’s the slice of the schedule short enough to be real and long enough to coordinate — and for a concrete sub it’s where pours, crews, and everyone else’s trades collide. This is a free Excel version built to be actually maintained, which is the entire battle.

Download the Look-Ahead Template (.xlsx) →
Works in Excel and Google Sheets. Free for use within your company.

What’s inside

Type one date, get the whole grid — enter the Monday the look-ahead starts and all eighteen day headers and three week bands fill themselves. The Monday roll is one cell, not a morning of retyping.
One row per activity — job, the activity in field language, whose crew it is, and a crew count in each working day.
A men-per-day total — the bottom row sums every column, so the week that quietly plans 34 men against your 22 announces itself.
Example rows and a legend — blue cells are yours; overwrite the examples.
Print-ready — landscape Letter, one page wide, made for the coordination meeting table.

How to run the weekly roll

Same day every week — Monday morning, before the coordination meeting, retype the start date and plan the new week three. The roll is the discipline; a look-ahead that skips a week is a look-behind.
Foremen feed it, one person owns it — crew counts come from the people running the work, but a single owner keeps it honest.
Week one firm, week three provisional — and say so out loud. Pretending week three is firm teaches the GC to ignore your week one.
Check the bottom row against your actual headcount — that one glance is the cheapest gap analysis there is.

Where the spreadsheet stops

Three honest limits. The roll erases history — last week’s plan is gone the moment you retype the date. Nothing checks the crew math — two rows can claim the same crew and the sheet adds them up happily. And when a pour in week one moves, the sheet tells no one. That’s the shape of the upgrade when it comes: on the pour board, the 90-day rolling Lookahead rolls itself, planned pours graduate through an approval step instead of a retype, the crew math is checked against the real roster — and a change notifies the people rolling toward it.

Run the next three weeks on it

Take the template and run Monday’s meeting on it — it’s free either way. And when the roll, the history, and the crew math start costing you, put one week on a Lookahead that rolls itself. Planning Ops is built for concrete subs, veteran-owned, with a 14-day free trial and your whole crew riding free as viewers. See the Rolling Lookahead →

Questions concrete subs ask

What is a three-week look-ahead schedule?

The tactical slice of the schedule: the next 21 days, in enough detail to actually coordinate — which activities, which crews, which days. The master schedule says where the job should be in June; the look-ahead says what your crews are doing a week from Tuesday, and it’s the document the weekly coordination meeting runs on.

Who owns the look-ahead?

Whoever runs the crews — the superintendent or ops manager — with the foremen feeding it. It fails when it’s treated as paperwork produced for the GC’s meeting rather than the sub’s own plan. The test: if the look-ahead disappeared on Monday, would your foremen notice by Wednesday? If not, it isn’t running the work.

How detailed should a look-ahead be?

Activity-level, not task-level: “B2 walls — form and pour” with a crew count per day, not forty line items nobody updates. Week one should be firm, week two mostly firm, week three honestly provisional. Detail that doesn’t survive the week teaches everyone to ignore the document.

What’s the difference between a look-ahead and the master schedule?

Horizon and audience. The master schedule is contractual — months long, milestone-bearing, the GC’s instrument. The look-ahead is operational — three weeks, crew-real, yours. The master schedule almost never changes week to week; the look-ahead changes every week, and that’s not a flaw, that’s its job.

Why does Planning Ops use a 90-day rolling Lookahead instead?

Same discipline, longer sight line, no Monday re-typing. The rolling Lookahead always shows the next 90 days without anyone rebuilding it, planned pours graduate onto the board through an approval step, and the crew math is checked against the same roster the Manpower side schedules — so the look-ahead and the crew forecast can’t quietly disagree.

The three-week look-ahead, and a free template that runs it