First of all, congratulations!
Don't have a lot of direct experience with long professional deadlines for comics, but did a lot of self imposed ones, and actually learned some things that worked for me (and some people I know) that I could apply to my day job, too. Maybe some ideas here can help you?
To me, the most helpful thing was to divide the work in units that would roughly take the same time. For example, penciling a page takes me about the same time as inking a page, so each page is 2 "units" of work.
To simplify things, let's imagine this was my full time occupation so I can realistically get done 3 of those units a day. Instead of calculating I'll get done 3 times 5 for the Monday to Friday work week, calculate 3 units Monday to Thursday and then only 1 unit on Friday, and give yourself the rest of the day for catch-up. Tuesday morning you did that panel that's just ok but you don't feel you really nailed down? Don't let it bog you down the rest of the day! Leave it as is, move on with the rest of the work, get back to it on your catch-up time. By Friday you'll have a clear mind, redraw it then, or maybe it won't even bother you anymore. It's Wednesday night and you still haven't finished inking every single face on that crowd scene? Don't stay up till 3 am, you still have work to do tomorrow, just leave it for Friday... I guess you get the idea. Ended up with nothing to do on the rest of your Friday? You could advance work for the next week, but if it's a very long project, maybe don't push yourself too hard early on and actually take a break that day, but you can still make your next week easier by advancing some of the busywork (rule out your panel borders for next week, find whatever photo references you might need, etc).
Some pages are more difficult than others. Some people need to draw the pages in order, but if you don't, be smart and distribute the complicated pages through time, don't give yourself 5 weeks of hell.
Another thing to consider about the order in which you draw pages is managing enthusiasm and energy. Eight months is a long time, maybe not every page is as exciting for you to draw, don't burn all the fun ones early on, or don't give yourself too long stretches of working on the less fun ones. Also, you'd most likely be tired and rushed by the end of the project: you might not want the last pages the reader leaves with to be the last ones you drew? Something similar can be said about the first pages, maybe you'll get in a better place (with drawing, with understanding the characters, etc) somewhere in the middle of the project (you've gotten into a good rhythm but you're still not burned out), maybe it makes sense to reserve the opening sequences for that time?
What else? This might be obvious, but just in case: if you're working on real-world-paper-like-god-intended-us-to and it's a long project, do not (DO NOT) leave scanning and digital clean-up to the end! Scanning a page or two as you go along is almost nothing, finding yourself at the end of the project with 100 pages to scan is a huge pain and will take you days.
Something dumb that I don't know if actually helps with work but feels good is keeping a visual track of the work. I've done just having a paper on the wall with a grid of squares, one square per page, and filling that square up every time I finished the page.
When my wife was finishing her last book, I printed a bigger grid and would draw a dumb plant for every page she finished.
There's something very satisfying about seeing those things fill up through time.
You might have to work out the amount of "units" to do a week/day/whatever backwards if deadline and page count is already set, right? In that case, let that inform how you get your pages done (maybe rethink style and technique if it's too tight?). Also, give yourself a buffer: you will get delayed, you'll miss days of work, things will get in the way, plan for it. If you have 50 days and need to do 50 pages, do not plan for a page a day!
Side note: all of this makes sense for the "work" part of making comics. If you're making "art", then all of this thinking is kinda crazy! Of course, nothing is pure, we all need to figure out for ourselves how much we want to think of these things as "work" (and the sacrifices and benefits that come with that) or "art" (and the sacrifices and benefits that come with that).
Ok, this ended up being way longer than I expected, sorry!
