I love planning trips, whether to Disney or anywhere else, because it adds to my anticipation and I feel more relaxed when the trip comes if I am confident that we will be able to do everything we want. But, I do not plan beyond having a general idea where we are going to go each day.
For a WDW trip I will look at park hours and come up with a general plan for where we will start each day, starting with the fact that we like to start our first full day at the MK. Then I'll rough out the rest of the days, with a general plan of starting one day at each park if the trip is long enough and using our hoppers to get to each park once as early as possible in the trip.
Over the years we have developed a general approach to each park that lets us ride each of our favorite major attractions in the first hour or two (a little longer at the MK). From there we pretty much wing it based on what we feel like doing and how the crowds and weather are. When it gets too hot or crowded, or if we are tired, we will leave the park, sometimes to take a break at the resort. Usually we go to a park (and usually a different one from where we started the day) in the late afternoon or early evening for a few attractions and/or nighttime entertainment.
Our approach lends itself perfectly to FP+. We usually make our reservations for the second park of the day, so they have no effect on the first several hours of the day. Those reservations give us the opportunity to do a few of our favorite attractions (usually ones that we will also do on our morning at that park) while also enjoying other nighttime entertainment. Because those FP reservations are almost always additional rides on favorite attractions, we do not feel obligated to use them if we feel like doing something different or going to a different park when the time comes. If we decide to go to a different park we will simply change our reservations to that park, realizing that we will probably have fewer choices than if we had made reservations further in advance, but that we will still be able to do some things that wouldn't be possible without FPs. In that regard, FP+ does not make us feel any more tied to a schedule than we ever were, and allows us to do more attractions than we were able to do with paper FP or before there were FPs at all.
I have no interest in an hour by hour, much less minute by minute, schedule and if I tried to develop one the rest of the family would revolt. We don't make many ADR's, usually no more than 1 or 2 a trip, for that same reason.
)
