Planning basics
How many things should you do in a day when traveling?
One anchor plus two smaller stops is the pace most people can hold across a week. An anchor is the museum, hike, or park day that takes three hours or more. The smaller stops are meals, a market, or a neighborhood walk. Two anchors in one day works once or twice on a trip, and then it stops working.
The failure mode is front-loading. Day one and day two get four things each because they're the ones you plan hardest, and by day four everyone is tired and skipping the things that were meant to be the highlight. Spreading the anchors evenly, with a deliberately empty afternoon in the middle, gets more done across the whole trip.
Travel time is the hidden cost. Three things in one neighborhood is a comfortable day; the same three spread across a city is a hard one, because each transition costs thirty to forty minutes of attention as well as time. Grouping by geography is what makes a day feel light.
With kids or on a slower trip, drop to one anchor and one meal. A theme park day or a long hike counts as the whole day, and scheduling anything after it is a plan that gets abandoned.
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