Hi Jenny!! I appreciate your insight and it's been lovely working with you! I actually engage with Dr. K's content a fair amount and while I don't necessarily agree with all his advice, his research is sound and super insightful. As for my plans for when team members experience burnout or other incidents that might hinder the schedule, I expect to have to do a triage based on our promised features as I give them the time they need to recover. One of the premises for our team dynamic that was proposed early on was the Equity>Equality where we as a team acknowledge that not everyone has the same capabilities and tend to work differently in varying situations.
To directly answer your question, I planned the schedule so that we at least have a week's buffer between bottlenecks before it starts impacting our workflow. In that week, I determine if: a) another member of our team can pick up the pre-requisite task and have them take that on if they're capable of doing so, b) I can shift the schedule so that the task can be done in the following week instead, or c) the task can wait a week and I can be assured that it will get done before the bottleneck arises. This is one of the scenarios I accounted for in our risk assessment, along with what to do if none of the three actions are possible and we need to move on towards cutting features. If you want to know more, I talk about it briefly in my Devlog 2 or you can check it out in our Game Bible!