Open time is the part of a technician's or crew's working day with nothing booked on it. In scheduling, the useful version is reachable open time: the open blocks where a new job at a specific address actually fits, counting the drive in and out.
Empty calendar time vs reachable open time
A calendar shows open time as white space. Say a tech works 8:00 to 5:00 and has jobs from 8:30 to 10:30 and 1:00 to 3:30. The calendar shows 2.5 hours open between jobs, plus 1.5 hours at the end of the day.
Whether any of that is sellable depends on where the new job is. A 90-minute job 10 minutes from the morning job fits in the 10:30 to 1:00 gap. The same job 45 minutes away does not, because 45 minutes in, 90 on site and the drive to the 1:00 job add up to more than the gap.
Reachable open time for a job at address A = Open blocks where (Drive from the previous stop to A) + (Time on site) + (Drive from A to the next stop) ≤ Block length
The same tech has different reachable open time for every address. That is why "do you have anything Tuesday?" is the wrong question, and "can someone reach 14 Oak Street on Tuesday afternoon?" is the right one. Checking it at booking time is travel-feasible scheduling.
Why the difference matters
Empty calendar time overstates capacity in two ways:
- It counts gaps you cannot use. A 40-minute gap between two jobs 30 minutes apart has 10 minutes of real open time.
- It hides drive inside the open time. Booking into white space without counting the drive means the drive eats the next job's start.
The reverse view is booked utilization: the share of the day with something on the board. High booked utilization with lots of unreachable gaps usually means the day was booked in phone order, not map order. Gaps that stay open are idle time on payroll.
Open time between companies
Open time is also what companies trade when they share overflow work. A contractor's open time at a given address is exactly what a sending company needs to know, and nothing else. In CrewConnect, the sender sees the partner's open times only, at the address in question, never the partner's other jobs, customers or prices. CrewLink computes those times the same way it does for its own booking pages: from where the tech will be at that hour.
What to take away
- Open time is unbooked time. Reachable open time is the part a job at a given address can actually use.
- Reachable open time differs for every address, so check it per job, not per day.
- Gaps that are never reachable become idle time.
Common questions
What is open time in scheduling?
Open time is the unbooked time on a schedule. In field service it matters only if a job can reach it, so schedulers look at open time together with the drive from the previous stop and to the next one.
How do you calculate available capacity for a technician?
Add up the open blocks, then for a given job subtract the drive in and out of each block. The blocks where the job still fits are its available capacity. The answer changes with the address.
Is open time the same as idle time?
No. Open time is unbooked time on the plan. Idle time is time a paid tech actually spent with nothing to do. Open time that never gets booked usually ends up as idle time.