Your strategy is going to get you more words, at the top of your ability, right now and next month. It is going to cause overall fewer words and lower quality over a lifetime. You are robbing your future to pay the present.

If you quit or moderate your coffee intake, as I recently did, you'll pay a short-term cost: both quantity and quality are going to drop. But it will provide a more solid foundation of rituals on which to base a steadily accelerating growth in output. Once you take a week or two to detox a bit, you can start slow: shoot for no more than 50-100 words a morning, and start going to bed at a sane time. Limit your writing to maybe 4 hours scattered through the normal work day. Experiment with locations and times (especially in relation to meal times). The words will be tough to find initially, but gradually you should be able to rebuild your previous output level, but within a much healthier and sustainable pattern.

That said, there is no need for manic discipline. If serious inspiration hits, there is nothing wrong with using the crutches of coffee and alcohol to power through a marathon session. But if it happens more often than once every couple of weeks, your threshold for "inspiration good enough to damage my health to pursue" is too low. Elevate your standards. Below that threshold, lifestyle quality is more important.

The interesting thing is that as you increase your practice, your lower minimum bar of quality will start to rise, and you can keep raising your "crazy effort threshold" in concert. So your minimum, average and peak quality will all go up.

This may help:

http://www.tempobook.com/2011/08...