Routes.
The time between doors does not show up anywhere, and it is most of the day. Half a minute deciding where to walk next, a hundred times over, is most of an hour.
A route is an ordered list of doors for one working session. Good ordering takes away the decision about where to go next and stops you doubling back over ground you already covered. On foot the order matters more than the distance, because a rep who has to think between doors loses more time than one who walks a bit further.
Common questions
- What is the best route planner for door-to-door?
- The useful question is whether it plans walking routes or driving ones. Most multi-stop planners are built for delivery drivers and optimise for road distance, which produces a strange path when the stops are houses on the same street.
- Can I use Google Maps for door knocking?
- For getting to a neighbourhood, yes. Inside one, it breaks down: there is no way to record what happened at an address, no way to mark a house as done, and the pin list becomes unusable past a few dozen stops.
- How many doors should be in one route?
- As many as you can realistically work in the session you are planning. A route longer than your day is a list you will abandon halfway, which removes the point of having ordered it.
- Is nearest-door-first better than a fixed route?
- For walking, usually. A fixed route decided in advance goes stale the moment a door takes twenty minutes or a street turns out to be gated. Recalculating the nearest unworked door keeps the order useful for the whole session.
- Is there a free route planner for reps?
- KnockMode builds routes by tapping doors or lassoing an area on the map, and it is free for one rep with no card. Map coverage is Texas today. Everything else works anywhere.