I did a spree of hacking last week, but came away very healthy. It was about 72 hours, and I only took breaks to eat and sleep. I follow a few basic rules, I

I did a spree of hacking last week, but came away very healthy. It was about 72 hours, and I only took breaks to eat and sleep. I follow a few basic rules, I would encourage you to do the same: 1) Find a comfortable chair with a comfortable desk. I refuse to work on a wooden chair, it's just distracting and like you pointed out, it isn't healthy. 2) Take breaks and eat decent food every once in a while. I went and got Subway and drank lots of green tea (has tons of antioxidants and some caffeine, which keeps you awake and helps your immune system deal with the lack of sleep). You cannot overdo caffeine because your body will quickly build tolerance. You have to sleep at some point. If you're tired while drinking caffeine, go to sleep. 3) I slept in two 4.5 hour chunks throughout 24 hours (biphasic sleep cycle) and it worked really well. Some people do polymorphic sleep cycles, and some do really weird uberman cycles. I suppose it depends on how much control you have over your schedule. I don't like monophasic because 8-10 hours at a time seems to have a recovery curve from waking up to being fully ready to go back to coding. 4) Work with friends. Preferably on the same project. 5) Play classical music (I recommend sky.fm solo piano station). Caffeine makes it difficult to learn new material because you're too energized (or at least it has that effect on me), but classical helps me focus. EDIT: because of the shorter sleep cycles, I remembered more of my dreams. I had some really weird dreams during this time (robots assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass).