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All the sweet relief that the successful fulfilment of a deadline can give you can be taken away so easy. Simply by looking at your calendar you can make it all disappear. Let me explain.

This quarter, at my aforementioned study of Industrial Design Engineering, I had, just like every quarter in my bachelor setup, two subjects: Strategic Product Innovation (SPI for short) and Product in Movement, being your basic Dynamic physics and differential equation math subject.

My schedule is currently pretty much focussed around the following:

- October 28th: Deadline Poster of SPI

- October 29th: Deadline Product in Movement

- October 30th: Deadline Report of Assignment 3 of SPI

- November 4th: Exam on Product in Movement

- November 5th: Exam on Strategic Product Innovation

So, as you can see, today was the start of a true deadline fiesta, and the hand-in was the first part of a two-part assignment of a three-part project, being a poster. SPI is a subject that’s all about figuring out what the best choice of strategy and pursuable opportunity is for a given company. For our group, throughout the project, it was kitchen and household accessory specialist Brabantia.

The first assignment encapsulated an internal company research to get to know its strengths and weaknesses. The second was, surprise surprise, external, dealing with the oppertunities and threats posed by competitors and trends and developments within the company’s scope, and then choosing a fitting opportunity with the information gathered so far.

The third and last assignment, and by far the most fun, had us pitching product ideas that played into the chosen opportunity. The best of these idea (which you can see in visual form just below this paragraph) was detailed upon, and the process was reported. The final product and its raison d’être was to be presented on an A1 format poster. Today was the deadline for that poster.

Printing something on a deadline-day at the faculty is quite difficult. Everyone generally decides to start printing somewhere between thirty and five minutes before the deadline, and though there are many printers, they're largely outnumbered, and most of them don't survive long enough to provide everyone with their precious pieces of paper. A lot of deadlines are missed this way, and it's quite crucial to learn how to deal with these obstacles.

This time around though, we had to print an A1 poster, and for that type of job there is only one printer available on which it takes about 3 minutes to complete a print. So everyone is all comfy, gathering around the silly paper spewing monster, judging and discussing the posters that roll out, and, one eye on the printer’s joblist, I see it’s finally my group’s turn.

...and then, nothing. The printing just stopped, right when it was about to materialise our poster. This happened at 15:15. The deadline was 16:00, so there was plenty of time. Right? Wrong. After a few attempts at reviving the machine, it started again, our print job nowhere to be found on the list. We had to resubmit the print (costing us an additional 6 bucks, the standard fee for an A1 printing order) and it cued in last. At about 17:15, our poster rolled out. You can see how people can get all touchy in their knickers from these shenanigans.

Deadline far behind us, we could still deliver the poster without any troubles, so that’s a huge mark on the plus side. This aside though, the thought of having to do this sort of thing every now and again, sometimes a few days in a row, might make one wonder either if the overall planning skills could use some help, or if it remains fun.

And it just so happens that it does. Because, in this case, the things that give me stress are, coincidentally, the things that I actually really like doing. So onward goes my death march, right through the deadlines, towards the exams!

...And I could use some training in planning skills.