October 21, 2009

Because they are stressful, most of us try to avoid tight deadlines. A client calls up with a high-paying job, but it needs to be done next week. Is it worth the hassle of interrupting your workflow and toiling deep into the night to make a little extra cash? Or would it be less of a headache to just turn the job down and work on a project with a more leisurely timeline?

While your natural instinct might be to lean toward the more even-keeled projects with roomier timelines, some interviews we’ve done at Behance have shed new light on the advantages of the short deadline. Illustrator and designer Christoph Niemann – who regularly works with clients such as the New Yorker and WIRED magazine – put the benefits of tight-turnaround projects in perspective during a recent conversation:

“In advertising, and also editorial, when people have 2 days, the briefing is much better, and the discussion is much better. It’s not that people just sign off on anything because they’re in a hurry. They’re just really looking at what they have, and trying to make the best product, and get it done.

The problem is when people have too much time on their hands. Because then at some point everybody’s going to question, “Why did you make it red, not green?” and “Could we try it upside-down, or left to right?” and then at some point it becomes arbitrary.

If the anxiety is about the deadline, then the energy really focuses on the result. If there is not anxiety about a deadline, all of the anxiety goes right to the creative part.”

Without the urgency of a hard deadline pushing a project to completion, it’s easy for clients to lose focus. The secret benefit of rush jobs is that the project has to wrap up quickly and neatly. We’ve all worked on projects in which the timeline just bleeds on and on, merely because the flexibility is there. As Niemann points out, deadlines can actually help us by creating a fixed window of opportunity that requires the client to be focused, pragmatic, and decisive.

Do you have any tips for using deadlines to manage clients and push projects to completion? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

***This post by J.K. Glei is based on research by the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network, the 99% productivity think thank, the Action Method project management application, and the Creative Jobs List.

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