Anytime one approaches a new design project, it is easy to get distracted by trying to have the project finished NOW, instead of doing necessary preparation work to ensure maximum work efficiency.  I am as guilty of this as anyone.  In the past, designing a website and bringing it through development was a hodge-podge of cutting Photoshop files and piecing together random bits of code, all the while constantly being frustrated that things were not finished YET.

As I've matured, I've learned to identify several time black-holes that serve to quickly derail a project's timeline.

Unorginization

Without question, this is the one for me.  It is especially a problem because from design concept (Illustrator) to web-ready images (Photoshop) to HTML (Dreamweaver) to database (MySQL) to application code (ColdFusion), my files are touching a lot of applications.  If I'm not careful, it's easy to, say, save Photoshop files to random places and then have to search for them when I need them in Dreamweaver.  While this is only a matter of seconds (normally!), it adds up over the course of a project and is frankly annoying.

So the biggest time and headache-saver I've learned is to standardize every aspect of the project.  This means I More >