An absolutely vital question:
How much am I accomplishing by staying up?
Many people become less intelligent, more distractable, and less
conscientious as they become more
sleep-deprived. If you're up long past your
bedtime, your efficiency may be dropping so much that it would be worth going to sleep. Let's say it's 4AM, and you're so
zonked that your productivity is only half-normal. Instead of pushing on,
rejuvenate yourself with a two-hour nap. By 8AM, you'll have
amortized out the cost of the nap and be getting ahead!
(you may want to nap at your seat, if you think you won't be able to get back out of bed)
Be aware of how stupid you're getting
I refuse to submit something I've completed after 3AM without having another person look at it. It may look fine to me, but something is going to be wrong. One of the lousy things about being
mentally impaired is that you lose the ability to tell how impaired you are (as a great many
drunk drivers can attest). If you're up eight hours late,
you are not doing your best work. You may be on a wild
stream of consciousness creative streak, but your
coherence, fact-checking, and
spelling and
grammar are all suffering.
The solution presents itself easily. As night turns to day, your friends are fresh out of bed and ready to catch your gross errors. The
internet is an especial blessing here. It's also very important to schedule some time at the end for
proofreading.
Very important.
Choose your drugs wisely
Stimulants will help a great deal, but you don't want to become too jittery -- and you don't want to crash. Many people find
green tea to be more gentle than coffee.
Ritalin, if you can get it, is one of the best
speeds to use. It helps concentration, stays in your blood for a long time, and at the end it puts you down slowly. If you can't, try ephedrine, which is also less jittery than caffeine. Ephedrine can be obtained in sleazy convenience-store
mini-thins, or in pill form at many truck stops. Finally,
B-vitamins are helpful in this respect, and combine well with any of the above.
Light
Light is vital to your body's sleep-wake cycle. Work in the most brightly-lit room you can. If it's past dawn, take a walk outside.
Also, a brief addendum to
beaneater's nice writeup:
dextrose is another name for
glucose, which is the body's standard
simple sugar. There's nothing fancy or trademarked about it. I believe dextrose tablets are sold because of their extremely
quick effect on
blood sugar --
diabetics can use them if their
insulin level gets too high.