Route planning for door-to-door
A door-to-door route is an ordered list of doors for one working session. Good ordering removes the decision about where to go next and stops you doubling back over ground already covered. For walking work the ordering matters more than total distance, because the deciding costs more time than the extra steps do.
What you are actually optimising
Not distance. The expensive thing in a walking day is the half-minute of deciding between doors, repeated a few hundred times. A route that removes the decision beats one that saves fifty metres.
Size it to the session
A route longer than the hours you have is a list you abandon partway, and an abandoned route leaves you without a clean boundary between worked and unworked. Plan the session, not the week.
Routes go stale
A fixed order decided in advance stops being optimal the moment a door takes twenty minutes or a street turns out to be gated. Something that recalculates as you go holds up better across a full session than any plan made at the start of it.
Common questions
- How do I plan a door-to-door route?
- Pick an area you can finish in the session, order the doors so you are not doubling back, and let the order update as the session changes.
- Does route planning actually save time?
- The saving is in decisions removed rather than distance shortened, which is why the effect is bigger than a distance calculation suggests.
- Can KnockMode build routes?
- Yes. Tap doors to add them, or lasso an area on the map to take a whole block at once. It works offline once the area is saved.
More on routes
Planning the walk: ordering doors, cutting dead time between them, and route tools compared.
- What route optimisation actually saves you
- Walking routes versus driving routes
- Why nearest-door-first beats a planned list
- How many doors belong in one route
- 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