Deadlines don’t care about your mood. Plan like you already know that.

A due date is one of the few things in your life with no opinion about how you are doing. It does not move for a bad week, a breakup, or a stretch where getting out of bed is hard. Building a plan around your best mood guarantees a collision with your worst one.

Assume two bad days per project and put them in the schedule on purpose. Start earlier than feels necessary, so those days get absorbed rather than becoming fatal. You are not planning for failure, you are planning for being a person.