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Planning client visits in your calendar, travel included

Published 14 October 2026

The DOFOTT figure with a briefcase, a map with several pins and a calendar beside it

Tuesday has four clients in it: 9:30 on the east side, 11:00 downtown, 14:00 in the industrial park out west, 16:00 in the business district up north. The calendar fits all four with room to spare; there are even gaps between them. By the evening you may have been late to two and pushed one back from the car park. The calendar shows the visits. It doesn't show the road between them.

This guide is for people who go to more than one address a day: sales reps, field engineers, estate agents, medical reps, trainers who teach on site. The aim is to put tomorrow's visits into Google Calendar™, travel included, in an order you can actually keep.

A visit takes longer than a meeting

The conversation with the client may take forty-five minutes. The visit doesn't. At an office tower, first comes the car park: the barrier, the levels you drive down looking for a space. Then security: ID at the desk, a visitor badge, someone called down to fetch you. The queue for the lift, the wait in reception. On the way out, the same in reverse. At a factory on an industrial estate, part of the job is finding it: hundreds of firms on one road, numbers out of order, a guard who sends you round to the back gate.

A forty-five-minute meeting is an hour and a half door to door. Keep the event in the calendar as long as the meeting itself; that is what the client sees in the invitation. But when you build your own day, leave room for getting in and out. The first visit to a new client deserves a bigger margin; the second time you know where to park.

Group visits by area

What costs a field day the most time is a badly ordered list. A day that goes east, then west, then back to the middle crosses town three times. The same four visits, with the eastern ones on one day and the western ones on another, cross it once, or not at all.

A simple routine:

  1. Split the week by area. Tuesday and Thursday east, Wednesday west, for example.
  2. Offer clients a day, not a time. "I'm in your area on Thursday; does 10:00 or 14:00 suit you?" That one sentence keeps your week in shape.
  3. Lay out the day on a map. Google Maps™ lets you add up to nine stops, the destination included, to one set of directions; enter the visits in order, look at the total, drag the stops to try an order or two.

Multi-stop directions don't find the best order for you; they draw the order you typed. So look at two things: whether the furthest visit goes at the start of the day or the end, and which road is clear at lunchtime.

Fill in every visit's location

For a client visit the location field is the most useful field in the calendar. But "ACME Logistics" isn't enough. Write an address a map knows: street, number, town. On an industrial estate, find the firm's pin in Google Maps™ and copy the address from there. Floor, building and "use gate B" belong in the description, not the location.

A location filled in like that does three jobs: it opens navigation on your phone with one tap, a colleague who takes over the visit finds the address right there, and anything that works out travel time (Google's map preview, DOFOTT) knows the right place. Why the location is the field most often left empty and the one that does the most work is a story of its own: You know the way. Does your calendar?

Putting the trips in the calendar, by hand and automatically

By hand. Google Calendar™'s map preview, on a computer, gets directions from an event's location and opens an event covering the trip before the meeting. The steps are in how to add travel time to Google Calendar. Between visits, mind one thing: start from the previous client's address, not from home. A four-visit day, with the way home, is five travel events, each one added separately.

Automatically. DOFOTT writes those travel events for you. You connect Google Calendar™ and give your home address; your work address and hours too, if you like. Every visit with a location gets a travel block before and after it, and the blocks link up like a chain:

With more than three hours between two visits, DOFOTT doesn't measure from the one before; it assumes you went somewhere in between and measures from home or work. A trip longer than three hours gets no block at all: that far, you are most likely flying, and a wrong block is worse than none.

You choose how you travel once: car, public transport, on foot or by bike. If you're taking the train to one visit that day, the link inside its block changes the mode for that trip alone.

When the traffic changes

A travel block says how long the road usually takes on that day at that hour. If the day of the visit isn't a usual one, say there's a crash on the ring road, that isn't enough.

By hand, the only answer is to check the map before you leave. Most of us do that once we're back in the car after a visit; in other words, once we're already late.

For trips by car, DOFOTT does it for you. About an hour and a half and half an hour before you leave, it asks about today's traffic again. If the road has got five minutes or more slower, it moves the block earlier and adds a note to the title, such as "leave 16 min early". Your phone's reminder is tied to the start of the block, so the reminder moves too; there is no separate notification and no app. How it works: how we keep travel blocks live. Trips by public transport, on foot or by bike aren't checked again.

If you're running late, tell the client

Even the best plan slips. The moment you realise you'll be late is the easiest moment to tell the client, and you are usually driving. A few things to sort out beforehand:

DOFOTT doesn't do this. It doesn't message your clients or write anything into their calendars; travel blocks are only in your calendar, and they are written as private. It tells you to leave early; telling the client you're late is up to you.

For teams

A manager of a field team looks at the team's calendars to see who is free when. Without travel blocks, what they see is wrong: the half hour between a rep's visit ending at 11:00 and the next starting at 11:30 looks free, and a team meeting goes into it. How your travel shows as busy, and nothing more, to everyone who looks at your calendar is in a guide of its own.

When everyone on the team uses DOFOTT, the road is in everyone's calendar. Blocks are written as private events: colleagues who look at your calendar see you as busy while you travel, not where you are going from or to. So nobody books you for a time you can't make. If you'd like to try this with a team, apply for the pilot on the teams page.

How much travel time should I leave between client visits?

What Google Maps™ gives for that hour, plus ten or fifteen minutes to park, get through security and find the right floor. There's no fixed number; a first visit to a new client deserves a bigger margin.

Does Google Calendar work out the trip between visits?

No. On a computer you can add a trip from the map preview, one event at a time, but Google Calendar™ never chains visits or adds the way home. DOFOTT writes a block before and after each visit and measures from the visit before when you go straight on.

How do I see my team's client visits and travel in one calendar?

Each person shares their Google Calendar™ with you and you add it under other calendars. When everyone uses DOFOTT, the trips show as busy in those calendars, without where anyone is going.

Does the travel time in my calendar update when traffic changes?

Travel added by hand does not. For trips by car, DOFOTT asks about traffic again about 90 and 35 minutes before you leave and moves the block earlier if the road has got five minutes or more slower.

Google Calendar™ and Google Maps™ are trademarks of Google LLC.