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. It comes in four horizons — the standard three weeks, plus two-week, weekly and six-week versions — same grid, same one-cell roll.

Download the 3-Week 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.

Pick the horizon

Same grid, same blue cells, same one-cell roll — the only thing that changes is how far out you are looking and what a column means.

Horizon	What it is for	Columns	Download
Weekly	The foremen’s week: activities, crew per day, and the note that makes each day happen. Firm by Friday for the week after.	6 days + notes	Weekly template (.xlsx)
Two-week	Fast-turning jobs, and GCs that run a two-week coordination meeting.	12 days	Two-week template (.xlsx)
Three-week	The commercial standard: this week firm, next week committed, week three provisional.	18 days	Three-week template (.xlsx)
Six-week	Make-ready: crew per week, and the constraint that gates each activity, with an owner and a date.	6 weeks + constraints	Six-week template (.xlsx)

The two-week look-ahead

Twelve day columns instead of eighteen. Run it when the GC’s meeting is a two-week meeting, or when the job turns fast enough that week three was never more than a guess. The roll is the same — retype the Monday, week two becomes week one, plan the new week two. If week two keeps surprising you, that’s the signal to move up to three.

The weekly look-ahead

One week, six days, and a notes column. This is the sheet you hand out, not the one you plan on: the foremen’s week, firm by Friday for the week after, with the thing that makes each day real written next to it — pump booked for 6 AM, inspection passed Tuesday, rebar on site Wednesday morning. Plan the weeks beyond it on the two- or three-week version; print this one.

The six-week look-ahead: make-ready, not crew-by-day

Past three weeks, planning crew by the day is theater. What six weeks is for is make-ready: the Last Planner habit of naming, for every activity, the constraint that has to clear before it can start — material on site, RFI answered, inspection scheduled, access, the crew itself — and who owns clearing it by when. So the six-week template changes the columns: one per week, with the planned crew per week, plus a constraint column and an owner-and-due column. An activity with an open constraint inside week two is a problem today, not in week two. Roll it weekly like the others; anything that reaches week three with its constraint still open goes onto the three-week sheet as a risk.

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, a double-booked crew is flagged the moment it’s assigned — 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.

Two-week or three-week look-ahead — which one?

Three weeks is the commercial standard because it covers this week’s execution, next week’s commitments, and one week of make-ready. Two weeks fits a GC that runs a two-week meeting, or a job that turns too fast for week three to mean anything. If week two keeps surprising you, you need three; if week three is always fiction, run two. The templates are the same grid either way.

What is a six-week look-ahead?

The make-ready horizon from Last Planner-style planning. Instead of crew per day it plans crew per week and, for every activity, the constraint that has to clear before it can start — material on site, RFI answered, inspection passed, access, crew. Six weeks out a constraint is cheap to fix; the six-week template gives each activity a constraint, an owner, and a due date.

What about a weekly (one-week) look-ahead?

The slice you hand the foremen: this week’s activities, crew per day, and the note that makes each day happen — pump booked, inspection passed, rebar on site. It should be firm by Friday for the week after. The weekly template adds a notes column and prints on one page.

Does the template work in Google Sheets?

Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Drive and open it with Google Sheets (or File → Import). The date formulas — TEXT, CONCATENATE, SUM — work unchanged, so typing one Monday still fills every header. Excel for Windows and Mac open it as-is.

How do I make a look-ahead schedule in Excel from scratch?

One date cell for the Monday; day headers that add 0–5, 7–12 and 14–19 to it (skipping Sundays); a row per activity with job, activity, crew, and a count per day; a SUM row at the bottom. That is exactly what the template is. The only trick is the single date cell — it makes the weekly roll one edit instead of eighteen.

What should a look-ahead schedule include?

Activities in field language, whose crew each one is, crew counts per day, the dates — and, past three weeks, the constraint that gates each activity. Not task-level detail nobody updates, and nothing that lives better on the master schedule. If a line doesn’t change how Monday morning is run, it doesn’t belong.

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 board flags a double-booked crew, screed or pump the moment it is assigned — so the look-ahead and the live board can’t quietly disagree.

The three-week look-ahead, and the free templates that run it