How many doors belong in one route
A route should hold as many doors as you can realistically work in the session you are planning. A route longer than the day is a list you abandon partway, which removes the point of ordering it and leaves no clean boundary between what was worked and what was not.
The session is the unit
Not the day, not the week. If you work two sessions with a break between them, they are two routes, because the second one should be ordered from wherever you actually are when it starts.
Overlong routes leave bad records
An abandoned route means the line between covered and uncovered is wherever you happened to stop, and nobody wrote that down. The next session re-knocks some houses and misses others.
Underlong is a cheaper mistake
Finishing early is easy to fix: lasso more. It is a better failure than the alternative, so err on the short side when you are unsure.
Common questions
- How many doors should be in a route?
- As many as the session holds. That number depends on your area's density more than on your pace.
- What if I do not finish?
- The unworked doors stay unworked and are still there next session. The problem is only that the boundary was not deliberate.
- Should a route cover a whole street?
- Usually convenient, because half-worked streets are the ones people lose track of.
More on routes
Planning the walk: ordering doors, cutting dead time between them, and route tools compared.
- Route planning for door-to-door
- What route optimisation actually saves you
- Walking routes versus driving routes
- Why nearest-door-first beats a planned list
- Route planning apps for field reps
- Using Google Maps to knock, and where it breaks
- Multi-stop route planners compared
- Free route planning for reps
- Taking a whole block at once