Is Sunday knocking a bad idea?

It carries more risk of irritation than any other day in most areas, and some companies and municipalities restrict it outright. Check your local rules before treating it as a choice.

Are weekends better than weekdays?

Better for contact rate in most residential areas. Whether that survives into close rate depends on your neighbourhood, which is the part worth measuring yourself.

Should I change days and hours at the same time?

No. Change one at a time or you will not be able to attribute the difference to either.

Which days actually convert

No day is reliably best across every area. Weekends put more people at home and more of them resent the interruption; weekdays reach fewer households but meet less irritation. Which trade-off wins depends on who lives in your area and what they do, so the useful move is to work the same neighbourhood on different days and compare contact rate rather than sales.

Two effects pulling opposite ways

More people are home at the weekend. More of them also experience a knock as an intrusion into the part of the week they protect. Both are real, and most advice on this question only counts the first one because it is the one that shows up in a contact rate.

The second effect is harder to see because it lands in your close rate and in complaints, not in whether the door opened.

The answer is a property of the neighbourhood

A retirement community and a commuter subdivision have almost nothing in common on this question. Neither does an area with a lot of shift work, where no day carries a reliable pattern until you have worked it repeatedly.

Which is why a published best-day is a hypothesis rather than an instruction. It tells you where to start looking, not what you will find.

Testing it without wasting a season

Work the same area on different days across a few weeks and compare contact rate by day, holding the hour roughly constant. Changing both at once gives you a result you cannot attribute.

Sales are too rare to show a pattern that quickly. Conversations are frequent enough to be informative within a couple of weeks.

Common questions

Is Sunday knocking a bad idea?: It carries more risk of irritation than any other day in most areas, and some companies and municipalities restrict it outright. Check your local rules before treating it as a choice.
Are weekends better than weekdays?: Better for contact rate in most residential areas. Whether that survives into close rate depends on your neighbourhood, which is the part worth measuring yourself.
Should I change days and hours at the same time?: No. Change one at a time or you will not be able to attribute the difference to either.

More on door knocking

The craft of working a door: approach, first line, reading the house, what to do when nobody answers.

All of door knocking