Dead Time Eats Your Profit: Plan Days and Routes Smarter

Dead time, the unpaid hours between jobs spent driving, parking, hunting for a customer who is not home, or doubling back across town, quietly eats more profit than any single underpriced quote. The fix is not to drive faster. It is to plan the day so the van moves less: batch jobs by area instead of by the order the phone rang, book each cluster into a geographic window, leave one honest buffer for overruns, and put the whole day on the crew's phone so nobody freelances the route. Do that and a typical two-van firm claws back five to eight hours a week of drive time, close to a full day of billable work, without adding a single customer or a single hour to anyone's day.

What dead time actually costs you

Run your own numbers before you argue with the idea. Take one technician on the road 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If 90 minutes of each day is drive time, waiting, and doubling back, that is 7.5 hours a week per van of movement you cannot invoice. Across two vans that is 15 hours, most of a full working day, gone every week. Price those hours at whatever your labour rate is and the number stops being abstract fast.

It costs you twice, not once. The hour is unbilled, and in most places it is also paid. In Sweden, travel between jobs during the working day generally counts as working time under Arbetstidslagen. In the UK, travel between assignments counts toward working time and minimum-wage hours. So every extra kilometre is wages out and revenue not in, on the same clock. That is why shaving drive time beats almost any pricing tweak: you are converting a cost you already pay into work you can charge for.

The five kinds of dead time

You cannot cut what you have not named. Most lost hours fall into five buckets, and each has a different fix.

• Windshield time. Straight driving between jobs. Some is unavoidable. Much is self-inflicted by booking jobs in the order they came in, so the van crosses the same city three times.
• Doubling back. A morning job in the north, an afternoon job two streets away, but booked on different days. The trip gets made twice.
• No-access visits. The customer is out, the key is with a neighbour who is also out, the gate is locked. A wasted round trip plus a rebooking.
• Gap time. Arriving 40 minutes early because the next slot was a guess, then sitting in the van because there is nowhere useful to be.
• The mid-day wholesaler run. A part that should have been on the van sends a technician across town at 11:00, in traffic, at the worst possible time.

Batch by geography, not by the order the phone rang

This is the single biggest lever in route planning, and most firms ignore it because bookings feel first-come-first-served. They are not. A booking is a promise about a day, rarely about an hour. So group the week by area, not by call order. Draw three or four rough zones on a map of your patch: north, south, town centre, the villages. Then assign each zone one or two anchor days.

When a job comes in for the north side, it is offered a north day. The customer almost always has a preferred day, not a preferred minute, so this costs you nothing in service and saves the van from crossing the map. A week that used to be four random destinations a day becomes four jobs within ten minutes of each other. The drive between them drops from 30 minutes to 8, four times a day, five days a week. That is where the reclaimed hours come from.

What to do with the genuine emergency

Zone days are the default, not a prison. A real emergency ignores the map and takes the buffer slot you protected that morning. The point of batching is that the 90% of work that is not urgent stops paying for the 10% that is. Keep one flexible slot per crew per day so an out-of-zone callout does not blow the pattern apart.

Book jobs into windows the van can actually keep

Precise appointment times sound professional and cause dead time. Promise 09:15 and the crew builds slack around it so they are never late, which means gap time when a job runs short. Promise a window instead, tied to the route: morning covers the first cluster, early afternoon the second. The customer gets a call 30 minutes out from the technician, which they prefer to a fixed time they have to wait in for all morning anyway.

Sequence each day so the van travels one direction across the zone, not in and out. Furthest job first thing while traffic is light, then work back toward base, or the reverse for your area. A day that flows one way has less total drive than the same jobs in a random order, every time.

Cut no-access visits before they happen

A no-access visit is the most expensive kind of dead time, because it is a whole round trip that produces nothing and still has to be rebooked. Two habits kill most of them:

• Confirm the day before. An automated message or a two-line email the evening before, asking the customer to reply if the time no longer works. Half of all no-access visits announce themselves the night before if you give people the chance.
• Capture access details at booking. Gate code, which door, where to park, whether a key is needed, whether a dog is loose. Ask once, on the enquiry form, and it rides with the job to the technician's phone instead of turning into a phone call from the kerb.

Kill the mid-day wholesaler run

The unplanned parts run is dead time disguised as being productive. Someone is driving, so it feels like work, but it is an hour of wages and fuel spent fetching a 40 kronor part. Two moves shrink it:

• Stock the van from the job, not from the shortage. When a quote or work order is written, the materials it needs are known. Pick the van the evening before against tomorrow's jobs, not at 11:00 when a part is already missing.
• Batch the runs you cannot avoid. One planned wholesaler stop at the start or end of the day, on the way, beats three panic trips through midday traffic.

A field system that ties materials to the job helps here: if every work order lists its parts and the van's stock is checked against tomorrow's route the night before, the mid-day scramble mostly disappears.

Put the whole route on one screen

None of this holds if the plan lives in the office and the crew improvises on the road. The day has to travel with the technician: the ordered list of jobs, the addresses, the access notes, the materials, in one place on the phone. When the crew can see the sequence, they follow it. When they cannot, they drive to whoever texted them last.

This is where a planner and a field app that stay in sync earn their place. In OdinTask the office builds the day on a drag-and-drop planner, assigns each job to a crew and a window, and it lands on the technician's phone as an ordered route with the access notes and material list attached. Because the field app is offline-first, a cellar or a rural site with no signal does not break it: the crew still sees the day and logs hours, photos and materials, which queue on the phone and replay when the signal returns. The office sees progress without ringing the van, and the van never has to ring the office to ask what is next.

Measure dead time so it stays cut

What you do not measure drifts back. Track four numbers weekly. None needs a stopwatch; a rough read each Friday is enough to see the trend.

Trend beats target. If drive time per job is falling and the billable ratio is rising, the plan is working, whatever the absolute figures are. If they flatten, one zone has grown too big or the buffer is being eaten by non-emergencies dressed as emergencies.

Start with one week

You do not need to redesign the business. Next week, do three things: draw your zones and give each an anchor day, send a confirmation message the evening before every job, and pick the vans against tomorrow's route the night before. Measure drive time per job on the Friday before and the Friday after. The gap between those two numbers is the profit dead time was taking, handed back to you.

If the day keeps drifting because the plan and the road are on different screens, that is a tooling problem as much as a discipline one. Try OdinTask free for 14 days and run one week of real jobs through a planner and an offline field app that stay in sync. See the pricing page at /pricing for what it costs after that.