Windshield time: the hours nobody pays you for
Driving feels like working — you are moving, the truck is on, the day is full. But the hours between jobs are the only ones that cannot produce anything, and nothing in your calendar will ever show them to you. Here is how to see them, and the old scheduling habit that shrinks them.
8:10am on the north side. 9:30 across town to the south side. 11:00 back north, two streets from where the day started. Nobody planned it that way — it is just the order the calls came in, and the calendar is a list, not a map.
By mid-afternoon the truck has crossed the same river three times and the crew has put in a full day with a hole in the middle of it that nobody can point to. Nothing went wrong. Everyone was busy the entire time.
Why the day comes out that way
Think about how that Thursday actually got built.
The phone rang on Tuesday and somebody wanted Thursday, so you wrote them into Thursday. It rang again on Wednesday and somebody else wanted Thursday, so they went into Thursday too. Neither conversation mentioned an address until after the slot had already been agreed to. By the time you knew where they lived, you had already told them when you would be there.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is not carelessness. Nearly every scheduling surface a small crew uses — a paper book, a whiteboard, a phone calendar, most of the cheap software — is organized by time, because appointments are made of time. Geography is a field on the record. It is not a dimension of the view. You can open Thursday, see six jobs stacked neatly on top of each other, and nothing in that picture tells you that two of them are forty minutes apart.
A list has no map. So the order the calls arrived becomes the shape of the day, and the shape of the day is a scribble.
Driving feels like working
The reason this survives for years is that it does not feel like a problem from inside the truck. You are moving. The truck is on. The day is full, and you are tired at the end of it, which is the same feeling a good day gives you. Every signal you have says you are working — and in fairness, you are. Getting to a job is part of doing the job.
But it is worth being precise about what those hours are. The field-service trade has a name for them: windshield time. It is the only category of hours in a day that cannot produce anything. A job produces work. An estimate produces a maybe. An hour on the highway between two addresses produces the fact that you are now at the second address. It is overhead wearing the costume of labor.
There is a wage-and-hour wrinkle worth knowing if you have employees. In the US, the drive from home to the first stop is generally treated as an ordinary commute and is not working time, while the drives between stops during the day generally are. Details vary by state and by how your crew is set up, so ask somebody who knows your situation rather than taking a blog's word for it. But the shape holds: once the day starts, the hours between jobs are hours on the clock. You carry them either way. The only question is how many there are.
For a solo operator it is simpler and slightly worse. Nobody is on the clock, so those hours leave no trace at all. They are just gone.
How to actually see it
Nothing is going to volunteer this information, so you have to go get it. The exercise takes twenty minutes.
Open any map that lets you drop pins. Pull up the last full week you worked. Not a good one, the most recent one. Drop a pin for every stop, number the pins in the order you actually did them, and draw the line. Not the route you would design if you were designing it. The route you drove.
Two things usually happen. The picture turns out to be impossible to argue with in a way the calendar never was — and you start explaining it anyway. That stop was an emergency. That one was a favor for a repeat customer. That one was the only slot she had. All of it is probably true. None of it changes the line.
If pins are more effort than you want, check whether your phone kept a location history for that week. Some phones record it by default once location services are on; on others it exists only if you switched it on yourself. Where it is on, it has already drawn the line for you.
Zones and days
The fix is old, boring, and well known to anyone who runs dense routes for a living: stop selling time first and geography second. Pick zones. Give them days.
Divide your service area into a small number of pieces — few enough to name without looking. The dividing lines that work are usually the ones already there: the interstate, the river, the rail line, the edge of a school district. Then attach each zone to a day, or a pair of days. North on Monday and Thursday. South on Tuesday and Friday. Wednesday floats, because something always needs Wednesday.
That is the entire technique. Larger operations run it with dispatch software that sequences the stops for them, and the software is genuinely good at that part. But sequencing is the smaller half of the problem. The larger half sits upstream, in the conversation where a customer asks when you can come and somebody answers. Zones only do anything if that answer changes.
And the answer does change. "Tuesday or Wednesday, whatever works for you" turns into "I'm on your side of town Thursday morning. Does Thursday work?" It is shorter, more certain, and it sounds like a business with a route rather than an opening.
The cross-town favor
Here is the specific moment that quietly undoes a zone, and it is always well meant.
You are booked solid on the north side. Somebody calls from the south side. It is a small job, maybe forty minutes of real work, they are perfectly nice, they need it soon, and there is a gap after lunch. So you say yes, because saying yes is what a good business does.
Do the arithmetic on that gap, though. The real charge is not the job. It is the drive south, plus the drive back north, plus the fact that both land on top of whatever was already scheduled after — so the next customer waits, the customer after that waits longer, and the last stop of the day gets the version of you that has been sitting in traffic since noon. A small job on the wrong side of town does not cost you the small job. It costs you the tail of the day.
And none of that ever shows up as a loss. It shows up as a favor. It goes into the book as a completed job with a happy customer, and the day simply earned less than it should have.
The honest answer is often a slower date rather than a faster drive. Not a no — a Thursday. Some people will not wait, and you will lose a few of them, which is real and worth weighing. But the assumption that a customer walks over a few days is mostly untested, and a lot of route discipline gets abandoned to protect a customer who was never going anywhere.
Real emergencies are different and should stay different. Water on the floor, no heat in January, a tree through a roof — those are worth any drive, and a business that will not cross town for them is not much of a business. The distinction that matters is between work that is genuinely urgent and work that is merely soon. Most of what breaks a route is the second kind wearing the first kind's clothes.
What zones don't fix
Some honest edges, because this gets sold as a cure more often than it deserves.
Zones do not help everywhere. If your service area is rural, there may be no dense pocket to find — the driving is the territory, and the useful move is building it into the estimate rather than pretending it isn't there. If you run one truck and one job a day, a kitchen or a roof, geography barely matters. If your work is dispatch-driven emergency service, the route is whatever the day hands you.
Zones also have a ceiling. Past some point you are turning away work you could have done in order to protect a shape on a map, which is its own kind of expensive. A zone is a default, not a law — meant to be broken on purpose, with your eyes open, which is different from what happens now.
One more disclosure, since it belongs in a post like this: Catalyst sells software to local businesses, which makes this an awkward thing for us to write down. But a routing tool can only sequence the stops you already agreed to. The decision to hold Thursday for the south side happens before any software sees it, in a phone call, with no map in the room.
Nobody can hand you your figure here either. What a day of driving takes out of you depends on your billable hours, your fuel, your vehicle wear, and what you would have done with that time instead. The useful version of this was never a number anyway. It is the map with the line drawn on it, which most owners only need to look at one time.
The point
Nobody wakes up and decides to cross town four times before noon. It happens one reasonable yes at a time, inside a calendar that was never built to show you what you were agreeing to. That is really the whole thing: your day has a physical shape, and you cannot manage a shape you have never once looked at.
Draw last week on a map. Then decide, on purpose, what next week looks like.