At altitude, the only reliable strategy is to go slower than you feel you need to. The body has an opinion about how fast it will adapt, and that opinion is not negotiable. Everyone who ignores it pays the same tax, usually around three in the morning.
There is a version of this in every ambitious programme of work. The plan is built on the pace the team could theoretically sustain, not the pace at which the organisation can actually absorb change. The tax arrives later, and it is also usually paid at three in the morning.
Urdu poetry has a great deal to say about roads, and almost none of it is about arriving. That is the part I keep coming back to on long drives — the idea that the journey has its own claim on you, separate from wherever it ends.
It is not a productivity metaphor. But it is a good reason to build one extra day into an itinerary, and one extra week into a roadmap.