"Drive during rush hour" and "weekend nights are best" are the two pieces of advice every new rideshare driver hears, and they're not wrong exactly, but they're generic enough to be almost useless. Your market isn't the generic market. Your car, your expenses, your schedule, and the specific neighborhoods you drive in all change what your actual best hours look like, and the only way to find them is to look at your own results, not someone else's advice.
Why generic advice falls short
Rush hour is busy everywhere, but busy doesn't automatically mean profitable for you specifically. A market flooded with drivers during rush hour can mean more competition for the same pool of rides, not necessarily more opportunity per driver. Weekend nights might be reliably strong in a city with a dense downtown bar scene and genuinely mediocre in a spread-out suburban market. The advice isn't false, it's just not calibrated to where you actually drive.
What "your best hours" actually means
Your best hours are the ones where your own historical effective $/hr, not just gross earnings, but earnings after accounting for the miles and time it actually took to get them, comes out ahead. That number depends on things generic advice can't account for: which zones you're near, what your car costs to run, how the local market's demand actually moves through a typical week, and even things as specific as which local events or work schedules shift demand in your particular area.
Finding this out for real, not guessing
This is where actually looking at your own history beats intuition. A pattern like "Tuesday mornings between 7 and 9 have consistently been my best $/hr for the last month" isn't something you can feel your way to, it's something you notice by looking at real data across enough shifts to see past the noise of any single good or bad day. DriveLens's heatmap and shift history are built exactly for this: filtering by day and time window to see where your own numbers, not the general market's, actually land. See understanding your DriveLens heatmap for how that filtering works.
Treat it as an ongoing question, not a one-time answer
Markets shift. A zone that was strong for you three months ago might not be anymore, whether because of new competition, a business that closed, or your own circumstances changing. The point isn't to find your best hours once and drive them forever, it's to keep checking your own numbers periodically instead of running on advice, or even your own outdated assumptions, indefinitely.