As a team which is only scheduled for 13.5 hours a week during build season (though near the end it usually goes up a few hours per week), the most important thing is to make good use of the time you're not in the shop. Programming, CAD, purchases, planning, research, writing, and as much communication as you can manage has to continue between build sessions.
Of the time spent in build, the two most important things have been:
- Planning, in particular defining the order and priority of specific, reachable milestones at a level of detail such that each work group achieves at least one each build session and tracking progress against the plan, and
- Practice, that is, giving students some experience with the things they will be doing during build BEFORE build. This is NOT to say that you should stop teaching and learning during build season, but that the more you can front-load this, the more productive your in-season time can be, both for the builders and the leaders, who will have more time for planning. We recruited about half of our rookies for this year during the summer, so several of them already have experience working in the pit (at an off season event).
Semi-colon cancer -- the disease received after spending too much time writing lines of programming code
- nehalita [more] 
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