FA2024 Time Management

“The most successful people in the world…manage their time perfectly”

• Time Management is one of the most important skills you will learn in Fab Academy
• A MINIMUM of 25hrs per week should be dedicated (focused, uninterrupted time) to Fab Academy work…this is not an exaggeration
• As the weeks progress…Time will feel like an increasingly precious commodity…every minute will be important
• Fab Academy is like running a marathon…planning, pacing and discipline is required to succeed
• Getting behind on work will snowball into an increasingly difficult challenge to overcome…and exponential increase in stress and anxiety
• Be kind to yourself and develop good habits from the start…be time disciplined

Supply Side Time Management

Organize and control your Time instead of Tasks. Most people start with a ToDo list…make a list of tasks and do them one at a time. The next task can only begin with the first task is done. If the first task is delayed, the remaining tasks are detailed. Control of time is lost.

Supply Side Time Management…is a highly effective Time Management technique that fits tasks into available time slots…to aid in efficiently scheduling and completing tasks.

Start instead with identifying available dedicated FA working time slots in every day of each assignment week. In those available time slots, fill them with tasks that you think you can complete in the alloted time. Stop working on the tasks when the time slot is over…do not extend. Learn to get good at estimating the correct amount of time for a task…or learn to do the tasks more efficiently. Be rigorously disciplined about controlling your precious time.

• Aim to find a minimum of 25hrs of aggregated time slots
• Be constantly aware of time…do not lose track of it
• Learn to develop a sense of how much time has passed
• Be brutally realistic…about how much time you have every day in the week…to do Fab Academy work
• Be brutally realistic…about how much time it takes for you to do a task, don’t be overly optimistic…things go wrong…schedule debugging time
• Stick to your schedule…have Spartan discipline about moving on to the next task when time is up
• If you constantly break your own schedule…stop lying to yourself…constantly reevaluate and refine your work schedule to be more realistic…for you
• Some recommended FA Time Management categories…research time, planning time, work/fabrication time, debugging time, documentation time

Make a Weekly SSTM Scheduler that looks like this…
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…to define and track your available time for FA work.

Spiral Development

“Aim high, be ambitious, go beyond your comfort zone to learn and progress as much as possible…but done is better than perfect”

See every project that you pursue in leveled degrees of perfection…from bare-bones functionality to full-featured. Work on the project in completion stages…Spirals. Achieve complete success of the smallest, least complicated version…before moving on and taking on the challenge of the next better version…the next Spiral. Move on ONLY if there is time available.

• You don’t have time to get stuck on one thing…move constantly forward and get everything done
• Again…Spartan discipline
• Design your project objectives so that there are different spiral levels of completion…from “Bare-Bones” to “Full-Featured and Market-Ready”
• Develop all aspects of your project simultaneously…get them to similar levels of completion as the project timeline progresses

Parallel Development

Modularity & Heirachy

Bottom Up Debugging