[Madison]

After reading this thread with interest and trying and failing to discuss my own experiences and feelings about burnout several times, I've begun to think that abandoning the 6-week build period would be a worthwhile experiment.

For me and my team, it might alleviate a few problems that are a big source of my burnout at the end of a season.

-- It'd allow mentors that are unable to commit to the schedule required to be responsible for major robot components to be more helpful. This is a BIG problem for me right now; I have very few mentors on the team that are willing or able to put in the time required to be completely responsible for the successful design and manufacture of major robot systems and I end up taking on all of that myself.

-- It'd allow students that aren't able to meet with us frequently to be more involved and take on a larger burden of responsibility throughout the season. We have a pretty big problem with consistent attendance outside the core group of students and tasks often require a lot of rework because plans/ideas/problems are not communicated well by students who aren't consistently present.

-- It'd allow our sponsors to offer more to us because our tight deadlines won't put so much pressure on the day-to-day operation of the their business. Getting parts from our sponsor in a few days is impossible and getting them in a few weeks is sometimes a challenge, but if we could safely wait three or four weeks, we'd be in okay shape.

-- We'd save a ton of money. We spend about $3000 on parts per robot each season and probably $750-1000+ on expedited shipping. If we were able to work continuously on one robot in place of building a second, that'd represent significant savings to our team. For this alone, I'm on board.

-- I might get to take one day off each week to do normal person things. That's exciting.