My Take on Route Planning
Okay, so let me tell you about this whole “zzz planning routes” thing I went through. It wasn’t for some big company, just a little side project I had, trying to figure out the most efficient way to get things delivered around town. Seemed simple enough at first, right? Wrong.
First off, I gathered all the addresses. Had a list, maybe thirty or forty places spread out all over. My first thought was, easy peasy, I’ll just plug these into a map app and let it do the magic. So, I opened up Google Maps, punched them in one by one. It gave me a route, sure, but it felt… off. Like it didn’t understand the traffic patterns I knew existed, or the fact that some drop-offs needed to happen before noon.
Digging Deeper
So, I thought, alright, let’s get a bit more hands-on. I printed out a map – yeah, an old-school paper map – and started trying to cluster the stops myself. Drew lines, circled areas. It helped visualize things, but manually figuring out the absolute best sequence? My brain started hurting. A to B to C? Or A to D to B? Each change made me rethink the whole thing.
Then I went back to digital tools. Tried a few different free online route planners. Some were okay, but they had limitations:
- Some only allowed like 10 stops unless you paid.
- Others optimized purely for distance, not time, ignoring rush hour.
- None really let me easily factor in specific delivery windows or preferred parking approaches.
I spent hours, seriously, hours, dragging pins around, re-ordering lists, exporting data to spreadsheets to compare distances. It got tedious. Really tedious. Felt like I was just shuffling digital paper, and honestly, it nearly put me to sleep a few times just staring at the screen, tweaking minuscule details. That’s the “zzz” part, I guess.
What Actually Worked (Sort Of)
After all that intense planning, trying to create the mathematically perfect routes, you know what happened when I actually went out to do the deliveries? Chaos. Road work popped up that wasn’t on the map. A customer wasn’t home, throwing off the schedule. The “perfect” plan fell apart pretty quickly.
In the end, I relied more on a general cluster plan I made early on, combined with using a live traffic app on the day. I had my list of stops for the day, grouped them loosely by area, and then just navigated from one to the next using real-time info. Flexibility beat rigid planning, hands down.
So, yeah. That “zzz planning routes” exercise? It taught me that overthinking and trying to optimize every last second on paper isn’t always the best use of time. Sometimes, a good-enough plan and the ability to adapt on the fly is way more effective. All that detailed plotting just wasn’t worth the headache for my situation.
