Your drive-time buffer should not be one number

Most shops that block drive time at all block the same amount every time. Thirty minutes between jobs, all day, everywhere.

It is a reasonable place to start and a bad place to stay, because a 30-minute buffer is generous at 10 AM and fiction at 4:30 PM. The morning is where you lose bookings you could have taken; the afternoon is where you lose the customer’s afternoon.

What a fixed buffer does to a Thursday

Picture four jobs across a mid-size city. The first three finish early and the truck sits; the fourth starts 25 minutes late because the drive that was supposed to take 30 took 55.

• Three slots wasted, each one worth a job.
• One customer annoyed, and they are the one who leaves the review.
• The tech makes three phone calls from the road, all of them apologies.

Buffer by hour, not by habit

You do not need traffic data to improve on one number. You need two or three, from your own experience of your own city.

• Before 10 AM: the short buffer. Roads are clear after the school run.
• 10 AM to 3 PM: the middle one. This is your normal.
• After 3 PM: the long one, and longer than it feels like it should be.

Rivera Plumbing in Columbus runs 15 minutes mid-morning and 35 after 3 PM. Every crew we ask picks a bigger afternoon number than they expected to once they look at last month’s arrival times.

The second half: re-planning

Buffers handle the drive. They do not handle a job that runs long, and a job running long is the more common failure.

What matters there is not prediction, it is the message. When the 11:30 AM turns into three hours, every later customer should get the new window before they start wondering. One tap, sent from a crawlspace, from your own number.

Where to start on Monday

Pull last week’s arrival times and compare them to the promised windows. Sort by hour of day. The pattern will be obvious in about four minutes, and it will be the only buffer table you need.