[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[Jon Stratis]

Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

ending stop build day would not necessarily mean you spread the same amount of time over a longer period. It could easily mean that you expand your work to try to accomplish more stuff, increasing the overall amount of time spent at robotics.

If FIRST did away with stop build day, there'd be no way for them to prevent that. However, we can, as a community, make an effort to shape our overall expectations towards the goal of tapering off work after 6 weeks. There's been some discussion, should stop build day go away, about the possibility of "week-0" events happening any time between week-0 and your competition. If we make a concerted effort, across all of FIRST, to keep week-0 events on week-0, then that could provide the impulse to get the robot done in 6 weeks, get some testing in at an event, then spend the rest of the time before your event on improvements or fixes for issues. But if you wait until right before your week 6 event to go to a "week-0" event, then that doesn't really happen. Instead, you've just expanded your work to fill 11 weeks instead of 6.