How long should your appointments actually be?

Ask most owners where a service duration came from and the answer is some version of "that's what we've always had". It was estimated once, early on, by someone doing the work themselves, and it has survived every change since — new staff, better equipment, different customers.

That number is doing more work than it looks. It sets how many jobs fit in a day, how often you run late, and whether the last customer gets a rushed version of what the first one got.

Both errors cost you, differently

Too short is the one you feel. You run behind by mid-morning, lunch disappears, every customer after about eleven gets a slightly worse experience, and your staff go home wrung out. The schedule said six jobs; the day delivered five and a lot of apologising.

Too long is the one you do not feel at all, which is why it persists. The day runs beautifully. Everyone is calm. You simply earn less than you could have, every single day, and nothing ever tells you.

Most businesses have both problems at once, on different services.

Measure before you adjust

You do not need a study. You need two weeks of honest timing on your highest-volume services — the three or four that make up most of your bookings.

Record actual start and finish, not scheduled. If your booking system timestamps check-in and completion, you already have this and can simply read it.

Then look at the spread rather than the average. The average is reassuring and misleading; what matters is the shape:

• A tight cluster means the work is predictable. You can schedule close to the average and trust it.
• A long right tail — most at forty minutes, some at ninety — means a variable you have not separated out. That is not one service. It is two, and pricing them as one means the short jobs subsidise the long ones while your schedule absorbs the difference.
• Consistently under the booked time means you have been handing back revenue for years.

Split what is actually two services

The long tail usually has a cause you can name once you look: a first visit versus a repeat, a large dog versus a small one, a two-bedroom versus a four-bedroom, a straightforward install versus one with access problems.

Splitting these into separate bookable services with their own durations and prices fixes three things at once. The schedule becomes accurate, the pricing becomes fair, and the customer gets told the real length up front instead of discovering it.

The objection is always that it complicates the booking page. In practice customers find "First visit — 90 min" and "Maintenance visit — 45 min" clearer than one option that might be either.

Buffers, and where to put them

Back-to-back scheduling with no gap is a schedule that cannot absorb anything — not a late arrival, not a question at the end, not a changeover.

The instinct is to pad each service. Better is to separate the work from the turnaround: set the service duration to the actual work, and add a short changeover gap that belongs to you. Fifteen minutes of cleaning and notes between jobs is not slack, it is part of the job, and naming it as such stops it being eaten.

For anything mobile, travel is the same argument. A detailer with 45-minute services and 25 minutes between suburbs who books them 45 minutes apart will be an hour late by two o'clock, every day.

Where the day actually breaks

Most schedules do not fail evenly — they fail at one predictable point. The complicated job scheduled at 9am that pushes everything after it. The after-school rush. The last slot before lunch.

Find yours by looking at when you start running late rather than by how often. Usually it is one or two slots doing the damage, and moving the hardest work to where there is recovery room after it fixes the whole afternoon.

Revisit it on a schedule

Durations drift. Staff get faster. Products change. New equipment halves a step. Nobody ever goes back and updates the number, so three years on your experienced people are being scheduled as though they were new.

Twice a year, re-time your top services. It is an afternoon's work and it is usually worth more than any marketing you could do with the same afternoon.

The honest trade-off

Shorter bookings fit more work in and raise the ceiling on what you can earn. They also remove the room that absorbs the unexpected, and a day with no slack is a day where one difficult customer ruins the next four.

The right answer is not "as short as possible". It is the real duration, measured, with the turnaround named separately — and then a deliberate decision about how much breathing room you want to buy back.

Trimsy records actual start and completion times against each booking, so the two weeks of timing this takes is a report rather than a clipboard — and services can carry their own durations and buffers once you know the real numbers.