Mentors, how do you prep for the season on a personal basis? Exercise? Yoga (not saying its not exercise)? Meditation? Prayer? Punching bag? Let your spouse know you’ll see him/her in April?
And on a more serious note, how do you take care of yourself during the season? I generally overdue it (sometimes due to lack of mentors), but I’d be interested on more senior mentor insights.
Sorry if this is a repeated post.
Well, cutting back hours is a start.
We have 25 hours of meetings on our longest weeks, and we don’t meet Sundays. That is a lot less than some teams and a lot more than others, but it seems to be a good spot for us where we can have less people show up to every meeting and maximize our productivity.
Taking a day off once or twice a week to just sleep or watch Netflix instead of building a robot will make most people more productive. Sometimes adding more hours to your schedule will result in a worse robot because of premature burnout.
Although, I am a student, and I attend more hours per week than the official length of the meetings, so it is a bit hypocritical to say that.
Doesnt sound hypocritical to me. You seem very aware of how to keep a healthy schedule and aware of your own limits. Those limits might be higher than 25 hours a week and that’s fine for you.
When the season ends, I want to be alive, with income, and not single. 1293 meets three nights a week plus Saturday afternoon, so the Wednesday night off is explicitly Date Night. And the meetings are at a relevant time since they avoid conflicting with work. Everything else is just rest and balance and knowing when to take a night off from the shop.
We just go to the local pub…
I’m currently planning a ski day mid build season (just for me, not the team 
) to take a break then. Otherwise not a lot of prep. As a teacher I’m coming off a two week winter vacation, so I’m not super stressed.
Make sure you block out some time for non-FRC activities you enjoy. Bonus points for exercise and healthy eating. I’ve also found that some mentor bonding activities interspersed make the season a lot more fun.
My fiancee and I joined a team that is highly competitive but has a solid core mentor group already. This allows us to come to meetings when we have free time without feeling extremely obligated as most major tasks already have a good group of mentors and students assigned to them.
This season the team will meet 2 weeknights + Saturdays, so we will most likely only attend Saturday meetings. It leaves a lot of time for exercise and eating healthy.
So far we’re pretty darn happy with our choice to join 177!
Next season when we’ll both be able to attend more meetings, our main goal will be to avoid going to the bar/restaurant with the other mentors after meetings (at least not as frequently). While it is a great way to bond, we always end up eating poorly and sleeping later.
Finally, we hammer into our students one saying: Health, School, and THEN Robotics. It’s important to remember this for ourselves as well (replacing School with Work, of course!). The work we do with the students is important, and it’s all too easy to see your presence at a meeting as critical. But there are things that are more important, and you need to pay attention to them first!
Take 5 years off.
Also get a flu shot, I haven’t successfully made it through a mentoring season without getting sick after one regional/district event since my early 20s, and the flu shot keeps me from being knocked down as long when I do get sick.
3 days a week max, and still a good robot? A mentor’s dream, but a bored student’s nightmare.
Many high functioning teams meet 3-4 times a week. Keep in mind a lot of work can be performed outside the meeting times.
That’s true. As a mechanical lead, I see it as a “i’ll never have enough shop time” but if you have 2 or 3 mentors and a few dedicated and knowledgeable students, a lot of work can be done during a meeting and newer members learning as they go doesn’t slow things down nearly as much.
1073 is split up into subgroups who meet on different days dependent on building availability (we have access to space where we can practice on Sundays and part of Saturdays and late at night some weeknights), mentor availability (people have jobs, lives, and only two of us can open/close the building), and sometimes when parts arrive. The two of us who can open/close the building are not teachers at the school and have engineering jobs 45-60min away from the school. Thankfully we both do live nearby to the school, within 10min. I am one of two people to can open/close the building, which means I have the potential of meeting 7 days a week if the other person able to do this duty is unavailable for any reason (reasons for either of us may include but are not limited to: work, family, medical, traffic, being out of state, travel, etc). This fact alone makes balance tricky. From January through April I expect to personally be at robotics meetings 4-7 days a week depending on the week, likely more when there’s a robot to run drive team practice with. This schedule is only applicable to me, in a unique situation. The students often meet 4 times a week, maybe 6 on critical weeks. Two days a week are “All-Hands” where all the groups are meeting simultaneously, one of those is a weeknight and the other is Saturday where we also do lunches together.
With calendars I’m an extreme case. I think I track between 20-30 calendars on my google calendar, I LIVE BY IT. When I’m most stressed, I plan out meals ahead of time, watching an episode of something ahead of time, and tell my students that I have a hard-stop on nights I need to get home to do things like laundry, or a meal that takes a bit longer that I can likely eat over the next few days. Sometimes too I’m extra tired, and I really have something big at work the next day, and often the kids understand that too as long as I’m understanding when they have something big in school.
Prior to build season I stock my fridge and freezer with easy-to-cook meals so that I do not have to go after fast food and snacks as my primary source of food through build season. I attempt to keep Fridays robotics-free but that’s only successful about 50% of the time.
I tell my close friends (who have lived through this many many times) that the season it coming up. I endeavor to make plans with them before build starts to reset the timer of how long I’ve seen them. I give them the dates of our competitions in whatever format is easiest for them to understand – this helps set expectations and not disappoint people, and also gives them an outlet to be able to see me outside of a meeting in the coming months if they wish to do so. I also have worked hard over the years to recruit friends either onto my team or other teams.
My family sometimes likes to do “Sunday night dinners”, which can be helpful in keeping up those relationships since often times the kids need to be home working on homework come Sunday evenings in preparation for their school week, so I can often sneak in family time there.
I’ve been doing robotics a very long time, and I’ve learned to cater the rest of my life around it, which doesn’t work for people joining into this lifestyle later on in life for sure.
So… it’s generally drive to work, work, drive to robotics, robotics, drive home, dinner, nap, repeat.
Looking forward to taking most Sundays off this year with no Bag. We’ll still meet this first Sunday to work on building the field, and I have 1 Sunday reserved to finish comp bot if needed, and Sundays during comp season reserved for driver practice, but we can rotate out what mentor is required for those.
I spent some time this week literally trying to get my house in order. Laundry, cleaning the kitchen, making sure the Neato will be able to vacuum, throwing junk in the spare bedroom to give me a false sense of clean in the house…you know the normal stuff. I find that trying to keep things somewhat clean help calm me, and it’s easier to maintain a clean start to an acceptable level.
I try not to do anything different. Business as usual. Tomorrow’s just another day.
Not a senior mentor so I might not have the best perspective on this.
In past years I’ve had not a whole lot else going on so i could dedicate all my free time to robotics. I would fit social stuff with friends and family in around robotics when I could. Not really the best approach but really not bad for my situation at the time. (As mentioned earlier in the thread by others, bar with friends was my outlet/relax/time away last year.)
However, in the off season this year I picked up a new hobby that I’m going to try and stay committed to during the build season. So instead of fitting my other activities around robotics, I’m going to try and fit robotics around my other activities. This way I’ll still have a routine of sorts outside of robotics so that it won’t consume all of my free time. And the other stuff can become that outlet/relax/time away that’s important to have during the season.
Another thing that’s helpful is to set aside a day each week that you go through your backlog of all none robotics stuff before tackling robotics things. (Laundry, food prep, cleaning, etc…) In my case it’s Sunday.(Until late Feb through March when I switch it out for a different day because we start meeting on Sundays…)
So I guess to summarize: Try and block out some time away from robotics that you won’t slip on to prevent the time suck/creep that the robotics season can become.
The main thing I do to prepare for the build season is just to take care of all the little things I’ve been putting off - get a haircut, renew my car registration, take stuff I’m getting rid of to Goodwill, those kinds of chores that I know I won’t want to deal with once the season starts. This year I also planned out my meals and made grocery lists for the whole build season during my Christmas break, which will hopefully help me avoid the decision fatigue of having to do it when I’m tired. But the biggest thing I did this year to prepare was just take a break from FIRST. This was my first year leading a significant fall project with my team, and when it finished after our showcase on Dec. 7, I was feeling a little tired of it all so I decided to not do anything FIRST-related until Kickoff. Other than a little light slack’ing about goals with my student captains and hopping back on CD today, I’ve stuck to it pretty well and am feeling greatly refreshed and excited for Infinite Recharge.
During the season, I have a handful of things I do to keep from burning out:
I’ve just got back from shopping for the next couple weeks. I doubled up on what items I could. I’ll grab a few others that are a partial resupply in a week (milk, lettuce, etc). I’ve been freezing some soup and meat that I made over break.
I think we will be meeting 3+1 days this year, but maybe more or less. We try to meet the first few days continously, but we have a few taking a play to state thespians conference next week, so that will be different, but I think we can do okay.
I live nearby the shop, and I mean to consider hoofing it some days. Winter can be pretty gray, so I hope we can take some breaks on nice days to enjoy sunlight. We get meals before we work, so that is a nice thing that parents have done.
However, I have a unique situation, that I help care for my elderly grandma who has some dementia, and so I will still be doubling on meal time. Luckily she likes the early bird special, so I can get dinner to her at 5pm and have robotics meal at 6pm.
I think we all need a few days mid-season to wash clothes, clean house, etc., and with the no-bag I hope to do it every few weeks, rather than at the end.
The biggest thing I can recommend to avoid mentor burnout is to get more mentors. It’s probably a bit late for that at this point, but something you should try hard to do for next season.
5987 meets a staggering 55 hours a week on a normal build season week (without staying late to make up time). There’s no way any single mentor could attend every meeting and survive the season. We have a number of dedicated mentors who rotate attending meetings to make sure there are always mentors present without any single mentor burning out. The mentors who don’t attend meetings that day are supposedly kept updated by a pseudo-build-blog system written by students and a mentor-only group chat. We’re still working out the details on the best way to make sure the important information gets communicated while not putting too much pressure on the people writing it.