Guides
Time management at a hackathon: how to survive 48 hours and make it
An hourly plan, the rule of stopping development on time, and why sleep is part of the strategy, not a weakness.
At a hackathon, it's not those who code worse who lose, but those who mismanage their time. 48 hours seem like an eternity on Friday evening and turn into panic by Sunday morning. Let's break down a plan that helps bring the project to the finish line instead of abandoning it at eighty percent.
The first hours decide everything
The most expensive mistake is to start coding right away. Spend the first two to three hours agreeing on what exactly you are doing and strictly cutting down the concept to what can actually be built in the allotted time.
- Formulate one key feature for which the project exists.
- Cut out everything without which you can still show a result. Registration, settings, and a beautiful profile can wait.
- Divide the work so that people do not block each other.
- Agree on what time you will stop writing code. Yes, in advance.
Vibe coding speeds things up, but does not cancel the plan
With Cursor or Claude, the project skeleton is up in an hour, and this is a trap: it feels like there is plenty of time, so teams take on too much. AI writes fast and just as quickly produces plausibly incorrect code, and an hour saved on generation turns into two hours of debugging what you didn't write yourself. Plan not by typing speed, but by the speed at which you understand and fix the result. Give the boring routine to AI, but keep the logic that the demo depends on under control.
Approximate plan for 48 hours
- First evening: idea, scope, project skeleton, role distribution.
- Night and first day: the core feature, the very one for which everything exists.
- Second evening: assembling the parts together, the first end-to-end run.
- Second night: bug fixes and demo preparation, but no new features.
- Last morning: pitch rehearsal and a buffer for when something breaks.
Note that new features end long before the deadline. This is not laziness, it is strategy.
Don't keep deadlines in your head
The most frustrating thing is to finish the project and fail to submit it because you missed the time. Keeping the rhythm is easier when the event itself prompts it. On Stavleak, the schedule and announcements are always on the hackathon page, reminders come in Telegram, and you submit the project through the submission form, where a personal checklist shows what is not ready yet. Upload what you have in advance and calmly add to it, rather than looking for where to submit a minute before the end.
The 'stop-code' rule
Set a time after which you do not add anything new, but only fix bugs and prepare the presentation. Usually, this is three to four hours before submission. Teams that build features until the last minute go to the defense with a broken demo and a nervous face. Teams that stopped in time present with confidence.
Sleep is a strategy, not a weakness
Sleepless heroics look good in stories and bad in real code. After twenty hours without sleep, you make mistakes that take longer to find than the sleepless night saved. Taking turns sleeping for three to four hours is almost always more beneficial than the whole team staying awake. A rested brain does in one hour what a tired one takes three to do.
The last hour
Leave the last hour for nerves and accidents. The demo breaks exactly when it is being shown, the Wi-Fi drops, and the required account gets logged out. Prepare a backup presentation option and record a short video of a working prototype in advance. How to put the pitch itself together, we will discuss separately.