How to plan a whole trip in one weekend, without 40 tabs open

Saturday morning: fix the shape of the trip

Before anything else, write down four things.

The dates you are actually away, including flight times. A trip that lands at 11pm is a different trip to one that lands at 9am.

Where you sleep, and how many times you move. Two bases in seven days is comfortable. Four is a holiday spent packing.

The one thing that would annoy you most if you missed it. Not the top ten, just the one.

The pace you want. Be honest. If you like a slow morning and a long lunch, three sights a day is already too many.

Saturday afternoon: find what has to be booked

Some things sell out and some do not, and knowing which is which saves you the most money and the most disappointment. Check these first:

• Timed entry to anything famous, like the Alhambra, the Sagrada Familia, Anne Frank House or the Colosseum underground

• Restaurants with fewer than about 30 seats

• Any boat, and anything that only runs on certain days

• Trains between cities in Spain, Italy and France, where booking early is often half the price

• Car hire in July and August anywhere near a coast

Everything else goes in a second list. Most museums, most bars, most beaches, most markets. They do not need booking, and holding slots for them locks you into a day you might not want.

Saturday evening: map it, do not list it

This is the step people skip, and the one that saves your legs. Drop a pin on everything you are considering and the clusters appear immediately. Three things you had on three different days turn out to be a fifteen minute walk apart.

Group the pins into days by geography first, then decide the order inside each day. While you are there, check two things for every pin: what day it closes, and what time it stops letting people in.

Sunday morning: build the days

Write each day as a sequence, not a wish list. One anchor in the morning, lunch near where the morning ends, something slower in the afternoon, then dinner somewhere you have looked up rather than somewhere you end up.

Leave two gaps in every day on purpose, one after lunch and one before dinner. Write down travel time between stops, because ten minutes on a map is twenty in real life with a queue or a hill.

Sunday afternoon: the backups

For each day, write one alternative for bad weather and one for the place being closed or rammed. Those are the lines you will actually use. A wet morning with no plan is an hour of scrolling in a doorway.

Sunday evening: strip it back

Read the whole thing and take out a third of it. Every trip we have planned, for ourselves or for anyone else, has been better after that cut. The days you remember are the ones with time in them.

What it looks like when it is finished

One page per day. Times, a route, where you are eating, what is booked and what is not, and two backups. On your phone, not in twelve tabs.