Useful article
October 10, 2022

The dreaded word "deadline"

Today we're going to talk about urgent projects, or projects for which the client has set a strict deadline.
If you have a deadline, it means you haven't organized your workflow correctly.
Why?
Probably every 3D artist's eye twitches when the word "deadline" is said.
Is a deadline bad? Let's try to figure it out.

The disadvantages of a deadline are:
1. Predicted deadlines in most cases do not coincide with the real ones. You have the risk of not meeting these deadlines and letting the customer down.
2. Exhausted nerves. Haste often provokes wrong decisions, and wrong decisions lead to mistakes in work. Mistakes in work endlessly overlap with each other and a lot of corrections appear. Corrections lead to delays in deadlines. The remaining short deadlines lead to a drop in quality.
I won't even say about the loss of emotional balance. Sometimes you think "Oh, i don't even need this money anymore, why did I take it?

From paragraph 2 arises the third: the work for the desk drawer. Quality dropped, the project is over just to hand it over, and the pictures are so-so. It seems that the project is finished, but showing it to someone is shameful...

Where do deadlines come from?
In practice, we can notice the following:

1. The client has set an unrealistic deadline. They are not to blame, it's a shot in the dark, and you fell for the provocation and took initially problematic work.
2. Manager from the client's side. Or the mediator, who beat around the bush and "played with fonts" to the last, repainted the curtains four times, and now, not to get the wrath of their boss, is looking for someone who can fix the situation and finish the project on time.
3. Account manager if it is a studio. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such stories. When a manager sees money, they see nothing but the money, mentally wiggles his fingers as if they are counting their commission and hear no one but themself.
They get better after a few such projects when you make them clean up these problems that they themself caused. Extremely "tense" managers do not get it anyway.
4. The Executor. Who was persuaded and pressured by a client(or a manager) and took on a project with a strict deadline but did not balance their strengths. Or has heaped up projects - like a hamster with food in both cheeks - and now does not know what to do with them. And it's hard to deal with, but you can't quit.
5. Incompetence, greed.
Some clients love deadlines for some reason. Why so is not clear, but they tend to break down any project to micro deadlines. But working in that case is not very comfortable, because no one canceled Murphy's law, which says: if something can go wrong, then surely something will go wrong.

So what to do about this all?

1. Don't take on knowingly impossible deadlines. Thanks, Cap!
2. Don't sign up for projects with calendar deadlines if you suspect the client will "play with fonts". And they will.
Don't think that if time is short, the client will accept the job the first time. Most likely you'll just get less sleep.
3. Fix in the Terms of Reference and the contract terms in the form of working days, not calendar days, with a note that the timing of the project does not include coordination with the client, acceptance and transfer of materials, holidays, vacations, maternity leaves, booze and so on.
Incredibly, many people work without Terms of Reference or an agreement, and have never even heard of a pipeline. It happens.

When can you take on projects with a strict deadline?

When you have worked with a client more than once, and you already know each other well. How they react to emails, how they respond, how they give out information, how they comment, whether they correct a lot and so on. When a client is a regular customer, it's already a matter of honor and karma to help them in a difficult situation.

How do you deal with deadlines? Do you often miss deadlines?

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