I would say slowing down is a good idea-- at least with official/required team events. After build ends, our team's required meetings drops off significantly, but we still keep time open for "other projects," which this year included quite a variety of things. Here's a list (Not all of these are entirely competition related, but many of them are):
- Our shooter team is iterating on their semi-finalized design (it's our holdback weight)
- We finished up a new battery cart (the old one was flat out unsafe)
- We've been drilling on setting up our new pit (it's slightly more difficult than last year, but a million times nicer)
- Our climber team is working on a third level solution (it's not going on the robot this week, but they think it'll be an interesting design challenge)
- Our media team has been working with Team 2512 (Duluth East Daredevils) on a media project (stories in the local newspaper!) for the Lake Superior/Northern Lights Regionals
- Chairman's has been practicing and creating presentation aids
- Media has been working on the Chairman's Video
- Our electronics team had been working on creating light-up gear for team members to wear at competition
- Scouting has put together a system and determined what we're actually looking for
- We're assembling a new robot cart (we created a parts list and got the parts pre-fabricated)
- We've been working on various other additions/attachments for our robot
- We've hosted a STEM Career fair thingie at our home high school (lots of fun, we'll be doing that again, and it was great for showing members how to interact with people at competitions)
Almost every one of these things is member-organized or voluntary-- we've found that while it's a good idea to scale back on the amount of meetings we hold, many students are at their peak level of involvement and love to soak up as much robotics as possible.
Really my personal opinion on what any team should do is ask its members-- if everyone wants to rest, that's great! I think you'll find that a lot of team members can come up with some pretty creative (and beneficial!) ways to prepare or other projects that can help the team.