Well, while i have to confess I fall off the truck now and again (I’m sorry I will get back to TPatJ I swear), I will impart some of the wisdom I learned at VFS while making my classical animation short because it is wonderfully simple and works amazingly.

Break your projects, or project, into these three separate categories-

difficult, medium, easy

then, do them in this order:

medium, difficult, easy

The reason this works so darned well for meeting deadlines is this; starting with medium scenes doesn’t overwhelm you, but breaks you in for the big stuff. You never make your best work first, so you don’t want to start with the difficult impressive stuff and then wish you’d done it later when you knew better what you were doing. You also don’t want to leave the difficult stuff to last when you’ve got the world breathing down your neck- trust me, you can save yourself a lot of pain if you just leave the easy stuff for last. I don’t mean leave it to the last minute- pace all of it out over a timetable, be reasonable with expectations of yourself, and remember to account for breaks. 

There might be exceptions, such as a very important piece of work or scene that fits into the ‘easy’ category, so it’s your call on whether to do that one at an earlier time to be sure it’s squirrelled away, but on the whole this simple sequence has saved my skin more times than I can count, both in personal projects and working for hire.