You’re facing a deadline. How can you ensure you don't miss it?

Remember to regularly review your plan as the deadline approaches. This allows for adjustments as needed and helps you stay focused and organized during the work process.

Design is designing your work. The main time consuming thing may be the iteration phase especially with the client. For me I like to invest my time on the client needs and wants. Not only functional but social and emotional as well. Model early and often, then spend time designing. Then most of the portion of the project time will be left to me to work on my own pace and planning. Otherwise there will be interference and time lost while waiting for feedback.

Planning ahead involves more than addressing a linear timeliness. Planning must also consider parallel path processes, dependencies, outside influences, resource allocation and sharing with other projects, team capabilities and liabilities, available funding, management commitment to and outside the project. It all sounds like a lot, but most plans collapse from failing to consider these up front. Pulling it all together does not need to be time consuming, but it does need to be thorough.

Every identified member of the team involved must fully and clearly understand what is expected of the team and of each individual. Further, all planning, budgets, deadlines, interactions and resource allocations and timing must be laid out in clear, simple to see documentation. Further, before any work begins, the team should come to an agreement to put whatever effort is necessary into exceeding expectations and finishing the project on time - including putting in extra effort to overcome inevitable failures and delays every project has, no matter how well planned.

Focus on quality does not meet pursuing absolute perfection. Quality processes means including constant tracking of progress, not skipping critical steps, and collecting data to be used in later process steps to maintain a finished product that is within the brief, at an expected level of performance, with identified areas of further development identified and defined.

Distractions caused by assigning work to members with no available time, management stepping in to offer input outside the agreed upon project definition, and lack of support from external departments to the design team are common. The key to keeping this is reasonable control is regular communication of process, inclusion of potential disruptive influences in decision making, and regular, clean and direct progress reporting to management. Distractions happen, it's how you absorb them and move beyond them that counts.

Set a reminder in every stages’deliverables. This is a project’s manager’s task. If you work alone you can use technology to remind your steps and progresses.

Don't forget to seek the joy of the design experience and project completion rush. Use that as your motivation for pushing through the problems that come up, and revel in every success and triumph, as this is why you chose to do this work in the first place.