Where do you find the time?!

your glad that you are being ran so hard you are now sub human congrats!! team or not thats not a life or a job thats paid slavery! no two ways about it.

 

Another thing you could do too is contact your driver leader and ask them to throw in a lazy (like maybe a solo run but put on a team) load every once in a while.

Soon you will guys will work into a routine. As a team you pretty much never need a 34 hour reset. A routine I like is to run hard for about 3 or 4 days then take a 24 hour break and do the 3 or 4 day hard at it again.
As a team doing it that way, you each could get an alternating 34 every few days.

Maybe once in a while you get to the final plenty early, I would suggest checking into a hotel then one of you finishes the load then returns back to the hotel and take the day off. You can get away with a lot more than you think, (especially if you're producing 20,000+ miles a month) the main thing is to communicate with the DL the why's and wherefore's.

 

If you put your PTA out a few hours you don't have to stay at the shipper, you can go to a truck stop or nearby terminal.

 

Amen to that!

 

I was thinking about this while I was driving today. You do know you do NOT need to be under dispatch to move your truck don't you? You can and should move to the closest truck stop as soon as you're empty unless you've already accepted a ppan.
Frank

 

And even then, if you are not picking up right away.

I have gone as much as 40 miles to get to a truck stop after unloading. No one ever said a word to me about it.

We do have some freedom in this job.
All you have to do is take it.

That freedom includes being able to get to a comfortable place, like a truck stop.
It includes the ability to adjust the times on a pplan to allow yourself the time you REALLY need to do it safely. And by safely I mean time for breaks and meals and anything else that would make the trip less safe for you if you cut those corners.

I adjust the times very often, and many times the load is taken off me.
But I have never felt that by doing so I have been penalized. In fact, I often get a better load soon after.
Sometimes the load I turn down is better suited to a team that can do it in the short time frame.
But whatever, I have never gotten crap loads just because I adjust the times.

Same thing with idling.
I always have a high idle percent.
Always.
But I intend to stay comfortable so I can be well rested.
It is always mentioned in my monthly review, but it is also something that is just mentioned. I have never been intimidated about it.
Perhaps because most of the other scoring factors, like fuel mileage and on-time deliveries and safety rating, are all above average.

We are out here to do a job, and part of that job is to evaluate every pplan before we accept it - and to turn it down if we can't do it safely and on-time.