For a more complete answer, see my other answer here: Haylem's Survival Guide to Code-Rushes

Short Term Solutions

If there's no way to work around that crazy rush coming up, make sure to try to follow the following rules.

Take Breaks

Take occasional breaks (or even naps), and make sure to rest yourself both physically, mentally and nervously.

Have a laugh with coworkers and friends, call your significant other or kids to ask about their day and check in, grab some food, read a few pages of a book, etc...

Sometimes I even prefer to pass on a bit more sleep time to do something fun, as I find I get more satisfaction out of that rather than a strict "sleep-eat-work" cycle.

Eat Well

Be careful to eat proper food and monitor your nutrients' intake.

Energy levels are important, and some food have an impact on your mood and well-being. Coffee and energy drinks may give you a boost, but they're not a workable solution if it's for more than a day (and beware of coffee addiction).

Know When to Keep at It and When to Get out and Clear Your Mind

Don't switch tasks too often to not lose focus (those damn context-switches and distractions that make you lose concentration and creativity on a task you were deeply involved in...).

But do not work on exactly the same thing for too long either: banging your head on something for more than 2hours doesn't bring anything good. In fact, educational institutions are well aware that having students study the same thing for long periods gets less effective after more than 90 minutes. Past that point, it's best to introduce longer breaks, or different topics altogether (so, these 4-hour math classes you may have had in high-school could have been organized in more efficient sessions...). The same applies to professional work, or any task requiring hard and sustained focus.

Get Your Time Back and Recover

If you had to make time for work, make sure work makes time for you. You gave them those hours of your life, make sure to get them back or to get paid. And make sure to use them to recover.

You don't need to recover N hours of sleep by seeping N hours, but a good night's sleep will be necessary. Also, be aware that pulling allnighters affects your body in many non-obvious ways: your stomach will be upset, you'll sweat more than usual, you might get shaky, etc... All these things may show up even though you might not realize them and not feel that tired.

Stay SAFE!!

Not related to staying productive, and it's kind of the advice we give to cyclo-motorists, but... if you're tired:

• avoid driving (for your and everyone else's safety...),
• eventually, you'll need to sleep. There's no way around it.

Lack of sleep is very detrimental on your health and it's been linked to perception of life level and conditions, and to life expectancy. We all need to pay the sleep-bank in the end. Dearly.

Longer Term Solutions

Plan Efficiently

If you're in a situation to rush, it means somebody screwed up something somewhere sometime up front. Definitely do a retrospective or post-mortem to figure out why that was, so it hopefully won't attempt again.

Plan your time more efficiently. Figure out if that was a project planning issue, or a personal planning issue. Most of these tips were written with the assumption that you were already fully productive during your normal work-time. If you weren't, that probably needs fixing on your level.

Learn to Let Go

In the wise words of Douglas Adams:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

Deadlines are sometimes not meant to be met. Learn to let go and mitigate.

The job will be here in the morning or on Monday, you can be sure of that. However, it's not guaranteed your co-workers will be here to help you during the week-end. Plus some will find that you make them look bad by working harder than needed, though you probably shouldn't. ^{(But hey, if that's something you are passionate about, go for it. But do know that this isn't right and you need to find a better balance)}

Don't be THAT GUY!!

Also, there's no point in staying until midnight on a Friday evening to send out a report that people will only see on Monday morning anyways. Even today with smartphones and stuff. You can send it Monday morning, or show up earlier on Monday morning (when you'll probably be rested and way more efficient anyways).

Change Your Job!

If the problem doesn't go away, managers and coworkers refuse to look back at the project to figure out what was wrong, and that's likely to happen again and this isn't something you do for fun and entirely willingly: run for the freaking hills!

Or this will be your life:

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Further Reading:

• Haylem's Survival Guide to Code-Rushes Dead
• Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls
• What Research Says About Working Long Hours Dead
• Am I too Young to Burn Out?

Short answer

Recharge your brain:

1. Get some brain food, e.g. eat a banana.
2. Power-cycle your brain: take a power-nap.
3. Get some air into your brain, e.g. walk around the block.
4. Get back to work.
5. Observe your own successes/failures, i.e. note what works for you.

Read on for a longer answer.

Observe yourself

One key to answering this question for yourself is to observe yourself each time you work long hours, and note what worked and what didn’t work. This is how I’ve found out what works for me.

Physiology

Food

Your brain consumes glucose, so if you don’t eat every 3 or 4 hours, you’ll get low on brain energy. So eat regularly: breakfast, lunch, dinner, 9pm, midnight, and 3am if you have to.

Secondly, your diet is hugely important: eat low-GI food. Do not believe any advertising that says bread, pasta etc. is low GI; in my experience, that’s rubbish. Meat and nuts are low-GI; carbohydrates are not low GI. Why avoid high-GI food? Because for the first 30 minutes you get very high on energy, but then you get very tired after that, making you very drowsy and unproductive.

So my preferred lunch consists of salad, fish or some meat, nuts, and an orange or a mandarin – low GI. Bad lunch: bread, pasta, potato, apple.

Appropriate drugs (endorphin)

However, there’s a place for a high-carbohydrate meal, and that’s where you can get a dose of endorphin by taking a power nap – anything from 10 minutes to a full 45-minute sleep cycle. Even just lying on the floor for 10 minutes can give you a power boost. For me, 10 minutes on the floor gives me 2-plus hours of high alertness afterwards; it works much better than 2 hours of drowsiness I get by trying to fight my body’s rhythm by just working through the drowsiness. Observe what works for you and go with that.

To really tip the scales in favour of getting a power nap, eat a protein-heavy breakfast (e.g. meat, eggs), a carbohydrate-heavy lunch (pasta, bread, apple), and then after lunch you’ll be very drowsy; do not fight this; take a siesta, get that refreshing rush of endorphin, and when you get up, you’ll have essentially given yourself a second fresh morning-start alertness to your day, effectively giving you TWO productive mornings in one day.

THEN, for the rest of the day, snack on fruit so that you keep your energy up, and don’t sap it with any heavy food. Ask a doctor or dietitian for more accurate and detailed advice on this; I got this plan from a doctor, but I may have some details inaccurate.

Many people prefer to counter their body’s natural rhythm by taking caffeine, but my drug of choice is endorphin: I prefer a short siesta instead of an afternoon cuppa. However, living in the Western world, I find it very hard to do this when other people are around. Another reason I dislike caffeine is because it stays active in your body past the time you want it, i.e. it works to keep you awake when you finally want to go to sleep, so you wake up tired the next morning and need… more caffeine – it leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of sleep debt. That’s not how I want to live.

Air

Besides food, your brain needs oxygen, and lots of it. I suspect that the period for productive brain activity, in the short cycle, is about 15 or 30 minutes. So you will find you actually perform better if you do something counter-intuitive – step away from the keyboard for a few minutes every so often and get some exercise! I often take a walk around the block, which also gives my brain some air – very important, and if it’s daytime, I get some sunshine – very important in winter to help prevent me getting the winter blues.

Other things you can do:

• Take a shower.
• Play catch with a soft ball with a co-worker for 5 minutes.
• Just do 10 or so push-ups - it’s really short, intense, gets the blood and air pumping, but you don’t lose track of all those programming items that you need to hold in your head.

Alpha mode

One of the benefits of physical activity is that your brain often switches into alpha-mode, where you can "see" whole problems and answers to solutions. This often happens in the shower, when just waking up, or when exercising. I have solved so many bugs at the gym during lunchtime.

Psychology

Then there’s the emotional side of being productive – being pumped, positive, and enjoying the work. What I’ve found works for me has become a list that I use like a recipe; here’s my technique:

1. Clear the decks - get annoying things in your head written down, scheduled or done, and out of the way.
2. Prevent interruptions - get comfortable - not hungry, not full; put up Do Not Disturb signs or body language.
3. Tune out and focus.
4. Get your emotions pumped - imagine the success. Getting pumped can include listening to good music, thinking hopeful thoughts, people contact planned/done, ...
5. Understand the task, the issues, materials/code.
6. Think through what you're going to do. Envision the goal and steps. Plan your approach; write down the steps/task list.
7. Do it - do the work.
8. Rest and refresh yourself, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Whole being

You can consider yourself to be like a car with several power sources– emotional, spiritual, mental and physical. Each one has its own “petrol” tank. For peak energy, all of them need to be loaded up and going well. You might be physically fit and well, but emotionally broken; this will really impact your work – you need to spend time on your relationships and have some alone time. You might be emotionally well but spiritually bankrupt – you need to reconnect with God the creator; you could even pray and ask for help. Or you might be physically low – you need to exercise and maintain your body. Source: Reading Your Gauges by Bill Hybels So you need to read your gauges and fill up the tanks that are low.

Lastly

Avoid distractions and procrastination. E.g. don't spend too much time on StackExchange like I just did.

The idea of 40 hour work week was introduced for damn good reasons.

The situations you're in should just not happen. Cure the organization problem behind them. Working tired is best way to create a broken product, and in single hour of such overwork you can (and likely do) create weeks of problems. Maybe not directly traceable, as they are imposed on customers, support, QA and other departments or the teammates.

Stop hoping to work 16 hours, and close up the keyboard as soon as you feel your brain is not up to good work. That's good idea even in regular work hours, but around a deadline when the regular reviews, tests, other stuff might be put to back burner? If you were driving half asleep would you press on?

Consider using a pomodoro timer like http://tomato-timer.com/ that will force you to take a 5 minute break every 25 minutes.

The pomodoro technique is really good for working on the same task for long periods of time. I find it really helps me keep focused when I'm trying to write a blog post or doing bug testing. More info on the technique is here: http://pomodorotechnique.com/

I would suggest lot of coffee :) But as we know this is not enought.

I think that you need to check the source of this kind of problem.

Maybe you have student approach and leaving more to the end of project? If everything is ok which you and problem lays on the PM side, you need to react and don't let yourself overworking. This make no sense because as you've wrote your productivity id 1/10 of normal. this is of course true there are some tricks (15min napping) but this is working on a short terms and not to everyone (for me not :()

If you or your PM/BOSS cannot handle tasks in proper way, I would highly suggest you to start using tools like SmartGTD more information can be found on the webpage http://smartgtd.com/

This is Time and Tasks manager available on iPad soon on iPhone and all other devices (Android) there is also WEB version on the way.