Any tips for keeping on top of things whilst doing short distance multi drop ■■
Anything beyond pen and paper and leaving it on break all day I mean 
Big kitchen timer and remember to use it every time you stop and start. 
There’s an app in the android market called truckertimer by spottydog, looks quite good to be fair
tinytrucker77:
There’s an app in the android market called truckertimer by spottydog, looks quite good to be fair
I recently downloaded this and it is indispensable if you use paper tacho. I don’t have 3G on my Ipad so I have to manually switch between drive and other work instead of letting it switch automatically via GPS signal, but seriously, this app is great. Works on android and apple. It’s not free, but worth every penny. Just a few quid when I downloaded it.
I Bought a cheap stopwatch from Argos for £7.00 which is all you need. Just click on and off as and when you stop
Very useful.
Essexboy:
I Bought a cheap stopwatch from Argos for £7.00 which is all you need. Just click on and off as and when you stopVery useful.
That works too 
I used to just use the stopwatch on my phone to keep track of driving hours. But this app does so much more than that. You can see at a glance how much driving hours you have left, how many WTD hours left and what your two week rolling average is as well as other data. It also records a daily log of all your actions plus a daily or weekly summary of drive time, work time and rest time (and poa if you use that)
And it only cost me £2.99 which is less than your £7.00 argos stopwatch (plus £320 for the ipad 
)
Haha yes, I totally forgot about that app, have used it and have the beta version on my phone but didn’t use it so much the last few months whilst I was on digi cards, stepped back in time into the analogue world so will dig out that app again
Ty for reminding me of that, doh doh doh !!!
Before i went digi i used a garmin sat nav on the trip screen and it timed me nearly to the second.
doing short distance i would have thougt it unecessary to be fussy
say 10 hours shift
work for half morning have break
2nd half stop for 30/45
then just do the rest of the day
schrodingers cat:
Big kitchen timer and remember to use it every time you stop and start.
Thats what I used on multidrop in a 7.5 tonner - it was great becasue you could set it to 4 hrs 30 mins and it would countdown from that
remebering to keep pausing it when stopping and then cancelling pause when restarting the driving became second nature after a week
Assuming you’re starting at 7am and finishing around 5pm…
Do 4.5hrs, take a 45 minute break, do the rest.
Probably a noddy question, but how do you account for long periods stuck in stop-start traffic? For example, on Friday I was caught on the M25 by the Holmesdale tunnel fire. When I got back to the yard, I was on 4h42 driving by my stopwatch, but in that I spent almost 2 hours driving 5 yards, then stopping for a couple of minutes etc. The bit that took 2 hours would normally have taken 3-4 minutes to cover, so I know I was really well in on my hours, but couldn’t realistically say by how much.
In this situation it wasn’t a problem, but in others how do people make allowances for these sort of delays? Keeping one finger permanently on the timer isn’t a realistic option, so how best to do it on analogue, when the chart trace ends up looking like a fine-tooth comb?
Gary
Like the others above - I never worried about it and just took an hour in the middle of the day between the morning deliveries and the afternoon collections. If I had a really busy day I would try to get a 15 in during the morning while waiting somewhere.
On our monthly printouts I rarely did more than six or seven hours driving, and it was often a lot less. Weekly and fortnightly hours were no problem either as I only did ten hour days at the most. My only problem was the occasional breach of the dreaded WTD and the boss didn’t care about that.