A plan that can’t bend is going to break. Build some give into it.

A rigid plan assumes the world will hold still, and it never does. The stiffer your schedule, the more a single delay costs you, because there is nowhere for the slippage to go. Flexibility is not a lack of seriousness. It is what keeps a serious plan alive after the first thing goes wrong.

Look at whatever you are planning now and find the one place where a two-day delay would wreck everything. Put slack there on purpose. Decide in advance which parts are fixed and which can move, so that when something shifts you are adjusting rather than starting over.