Ask someone what went wrong with their last holiday and the answer is rarely the destination. It is that they saw eleven things in nine days and cannot remember four of them.
The fix is unglamorous. Plan fewer places, and plan the days rather than the list.
The three-night rule
Two nights in a place gives you one full day. By the time you have found the good coffee and worked out which direction the sea is in, you are packing.
Three nights gives you two full days and, crucially, a morning that belongs to you rather than to a transfer. Almost every trip improves by cutting one destination and adding those nights elsewhere.
Cut one place. Give its nights to the two on either side.
Build around the hard-to-move things
Some things only happen at one time: sunrise at a viewpoint, a market that runs on Thursdays, a permit with a fixed date. Place those first and let everything else arrange itself around them.
Then leave one genuinely empty day per week. Not a light day — an empty one. It absorbs the delayed ferry, the day you feel unwell, and the place you liked enough to want a second go at.
Be honest about transfer time
Door to door, a two-hour drive is a half day once you have packed, checked out, stopped, arrived and checked in. Count it as one, and a flight as most of a day.
If your itinerary has more than one transfer every three days, it is a transport schedule with sightseeing attached.
