One of most important tools for any project is a schedule. A Gantt Chart is a great way to get organized. At work I use Project or Primavera, but for FIRST excel or a Google Doc works wonders. It doesn't have to complicated to be useful, sometimes high level is all you need.
There's a couple of factors that can be even more important than what type of schedule. One is associating an appropriate amount of work to a given task. Things will rarely go quicker than expected, so account for that too. If you don't know how long something will take, allow for some time to learn the factors you don't know. Build in time to practice, code, test, adjust and sleep... Another factor is to hold sub teams accountable to their tasks and compromise as needed.
I believe, if more teams went through this exercise, it would drive them to simpler design choices and more competitive solutions. In Exploding Bacon's first two seasons we made significant design sacrifices in order to allow sufficient driver practice and autonomous programming. It resulted in an a championship division finalist and division win. In both cases the schedule made the decisions for us. In the years we stretched, and missed dates, we struggled.
Robot in 3 days recently posted an example of a simplified 2013 Gantt Chart here.
It was originally developed in Goodle Docs and shared amongst team members there.
A robot is replaced every season by the next robot, but a friend, team member, mentor, and memories will never be replaced. - Jverdon [more] 
01-01-2013, 17:57
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