I learned the hard way: do NOT go overboard on programming projects. It is way too much work.
I spent probably seven to eight hours programming my recent C++ assignment that was supposed to be a simple menu-driven command line application. I had to overcomplicate it hower. I made a menu controller, and made it allow registering of command objects. Then, I made each of the eleven (I think...) commands as separate classes, inheriting the base command class. In addition to that, I created the model for the application (a phone book of students and staff). Further, I allowed removal of items added (not a requirement), and saving of the entries to a file in a machine-readable format, and reading of that same format (again, neither one a requirement - though writing to a human readable file was). I added support for quotes to allow values to take up more than one word. I added support for backslashes within those quotes to escape quotes.
I could have used a simple switch statement for detecting menu commands. I could have made it completely straightforward, with none of the bells and whistles I added. I didn't. It was a big mistake. Not only was the project 37 files instead of the 7 files, but it was much more complicated than it needed to be (though, much more modular and, perhaps, well-written).