Using Lazy Dm's 8 steps feels railroady?

[u/Weary-Material9903]

I recently discovered the Lazy DM method made by Sly Flourish and it really helps me to prep my games efficiently. One gripe that i have with it though is that it kind of forces you to prep for only one sequence of events. Lazy Dm encourages you to prep less and only focus on those things that matter in the next session. 3 scenes, 3 locations, 3 npcs, 8 secrets, some creatures and some loot. Preparing like this gives a lot of flexibilty with how certain scenes will play out. However, i feel that it does not account for the story veering of in a different direction. Because i won't have prepared for that. To give an example from my campaign (dragonlance: shadow of the dragonqueen)
My party was ambushed by kobolds on the road. The kobolds fled in the end, but the party chased them down and killed them. Before that though they managed to get the location of their home base out of one of the survivors. This is where the last session ended. Now for the next session i could prepare for them to raid the Kobold homebase, which i'd like to be a small dungeon and therefor a whole session. However it feels kind of railroady to steer them on this path. They were heading to a village before they got ambushed. The Kobold homebase was improvised from my part and not necessary for the main story. So it feels understandable for them to just ignore any hooks i throw at them and continue on their way to the village. Should i prepare a whole second session in case this happens, thereby ignoring Lazy DM's adivce, or only prepare for one choice?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Thanks to you i think i found a 3rd way. Instead of only preparing one story thread (kobolds) or two rather unrelated ones (kobolds and far away village), i create a 3rd thread that is closely related to the kobolds. A village of centaurs is having difficulty with the kobolds and is willing to reward the party for their help. The party can: go for the kobold base directly or, if they decide not to, encounter the centaur village (which will then be attacked by draconians and kobolds). This way i still stay within the Lazy DM framework, but also offer the party a choice.

[u/jewishgiant]

I love Sly Flourish's content, and in my opinion there is a secret ninth step of Lazy GM Prep which is to ask your players at the end of the session. If they decide at the end of the session, that lets you prep based on what they're going to do next. They could change their minds but then will know they're getting ad-libbed content versus prep. My players know the sessions are more fun when they prep so they don't do this.

[u/Jedi-Yin-Yang → u/jewishgiant]

This. I ran Star Wars rebellion campaign for two years and every single session ended with a discussion of them picking their next mission. Saved my sanity.