How to play
Errands
Eight errands, real opening hours. Nearest-first wastes the day at shut doors.
- Eight errands, each with its own opening hours and a travel time to reach it.
- Put them in the order you would run them, starting and ending at home.
- Submit the day. The clock is then run for real, waiting included.
How it is scored
Your day is measured against the fastest possible order through all eight, which we compute exactly rather than estimate. The score is your total time as a percentage of that optimum, so 100% is perfect. Arriving somewhere before it opens costs you the wait; arriving after it closes costs a penalty but does not end the day, so you always finish with a score.
The obvious order is rarely the best one. Going to the nearest thing next is exactly the habit the opening hours are built to punish, and the reveal draws your day against the optimal one so you can see where the waiting went.
How to get better at it
The tight windows dictate the order, not the distances. Find the errand with the narrowest opening hours and build the day around it.
Work backwards from whatever closes first. If something shuts at noon and takes twenty minutes, everything else has to fit around that, and no amount of clever routing rescues a day that misses it.
Waiting is the hidden cost. Arriving before a place opens is time spent standing still, and it appears nowhere in the distances, which is why the nearest-first order loses.
A missed window costs a penalty but does not end the day. If one errand is genuinely impossible, take the hit and optimise the rest rather than wrecking the schedule to save it.
When it resets
New puzzle at your local midnight.